You may have seen the big debate on LinkedIn - should we share interview questions with candidates beforehand?

For Ellie Long, Global Head of Emerging Talent at Rolls-Royce, the answer is clear. While it’s a bold move, she believes it’s the right one. Her philosophy? Set candidates up for success so they can showcase their skills and potential. And in the age of AI, this has never been more important. That’s because many candidates assume AI will give them an edge—but in reality, it might be holding them back.

With a background in Early Careers at E.ON UK, Ellie is passionate about using emerging talent as a strategic leaver focused on future skills and capabilities. In this episode, she shares why supporting all candidates is crucial — especially in the AI era — and how focusing on potential, not polish, is the key to building future talent.

Join host Robert Newry and Ellie Long as they discuss:

💡 Turning the tide of AI-generated applications  – How to turn 1000s of identical AI-generated applications to your advantage and better support candidates throughout the hiring process.

🤖​ ChatGPT in hiring – The UK initiative and approach to guiding candidates on using ChatGPT: leveraging it as a research tool while ensuring applications remain authentic and truly representative of the individual.

⚡ A ‘Why Wouldn’t We?’ mindset – Ellie’s philosophy of starting from ‘yes’ to drive innovation, challenge the status quo, and keep the team forward-thinking.

🫶 Enhancing the candidate experience – The importance of transparency in hiring. In the UK Rolls-Royce has shared interview questions, assessment materials, and even the scoring matrix to help candidates perform at their best.

This episode is packed with insights and actionable learnings for talent acquisition leaders navigating the era of the AI-enabled candidate in early career recruitment.

Listen now 👇

 
Transcript:

Robert: Welcome to the TA Disruptors podcast. I'm Robert Newry, co-founder and chief explorer at Arctic Shores, the task-based psychometric company that helps organizations uncover potential and see more in people. And this is our third series of the podcast and I am focusing for this one on some of the big and bold ideas that TA leaders are adopting in order to deal with the fast-changing and ever-shifting world of talent acquisition. 

And speaking about TA leaders and bold TA leaders, I am very delighted and pleased to be welcoming Ellie Long, Global Head of Emerging Talent at Rolls-Royce. And if you'll excuse the pun, you have a Rolls-Royce pedigree in the early careers space. Having spent five years at the utility company E.ON before then joining Rolls-Royce and a very impressive and rapid rise within the talent acquisition function at Rolls-Royce. You're also the winner of the rising star category at the Great British Business Women of the Year Awards and a past finalist of the Early Careers Professional of the Year at the Target Job Awards. 

But the thing that really connects us is our mutual passion for how we support disadvantaged, particularly young disadvantaged people to get jobs in the workplace and specifically how we tackle the problem of social mobility, which continues to be a real problem and challenge in our society. And so it's a real delight to have somebody who shares that passion with me, and welcome to the podcast. 

Ellie: Thank you for having me, it's a delight to be here. 

Robert: One of the things I wanted to start with really is, I talked earlier about people who, TA leaders who are introducing bold ideas and challenging the status quo. And last year there was a huge social media storm when John Lewis announced that for experienced hires they were going to reveal their interview questions in advance. And you had all sorts of people speculating about what that actually meant, some of which was informed, most of which was not informed. And it left many people quite confused as to whether this was a good idea or a bad idea. But you were one of the people who clearly looked at this, thought about this and said, actually, maybe this is something that I could do. Or maybe you'd been thinking about it before John Lewis had gone about that. So would you just be able to share, you know, what prompted you to go down this route of sharing much more information than we've ever previously shared, but particularly giving up interview questions in advance, yeah, from the traditional way that most people have done early careers. 

Ellie: Yeah, so I guess if I track back to one of Rolls-Royce's, I'm gonna challenge, one of the great things about Rolls-Royce from an emerging talent, early career perspective is we get a lot of applications, which you can put for me, I'm not sure. One of our challenges and opportunities, I like to say, is actually how we do more with those applications when they come in to our funnel and how do we support candidates better? So actually it's not just the ones that may be applied first or it's not the ones that have got the most jazzy, shiniest, wonderfulest CVs because normally they're not always the most diverse talent and it kind of leads you back to the points of social mobility.

 So without going down the whole of that kind of train of thought, a lot of the work we've been doing over the past couple of years is around how do we level the playing field once people apply and how do we, once we've got them into our funnel because we all do all this great attraction work. I see loads of other organisations doing it. We spend so much of our budget and energy on how we attract people to want to call and work for us, which I'm not saying isn't the right thing to do, but actually we then don't focus on, once they're in our processes, how do we really set those young people up for success and how do we really level the playing field? How do we remove the barriers that might be in place at certain points in a process that are disadvantaging certain groups of young people? So we've been doing a lot of thought and a lot of, I guess,

Yeah, challenging ourselves, thinking and looking at our processes. So that's probably where some of it has stemmed from. One of the changes that, or I guess one of the adjustments that we made, we did a big piece of our neurodiversity a couple of years ago. And through that, we started sharing more about our process with neurodiverse candidates. So one of the reasonable adjustments that we've offered for a long time has been for a neurodiverse candidate to have access to some of the questions or materials in advance, whether that be days or in the morning, depending on the individual.

Robert:  So you'd already seen some feedback. You'd seen some improvements in terms of how relaxed they were or less anxious that they were. So you already had some evidence that doing this is a helpful thing to do. 

Ellie: Yeah, and actually it isn't all of a sudden giving someone an extreme unfair advantage, which I think is where some people's brains goes to. 

Robert: Absolutely it is, that's right. 

Ellie: Almost all of a sudden the person that had those questions is now gonna do 10 times better than someone else. It's not like an exam, an interview shouldn't be like an exam. It's not like we're giving someone the answers. So I don't even think that's a comparison. I see people making that comparison. It's not a comparison you can make. 

And I honestly, and I say, I wake up, I have a lot of these thoughts sometimes in the night or randomly at the weekend when you're doing something else. You kind of play through the process and what can we do and what can we look at? And I get to a point where I go, well, why wouldn't we? 

Robert: And so I say philosophy about why wouldn't we? 

Ellie: So a lot of the stuff I do with my team and a lot of the conversations I have with them, I go, well, let's start from the point of, let's just do it. And then let's ask why we wouldn't do it rather than saying, well, why should we do some things? So this is one of the, I guess the many examples of some of the changes that we've made. I don't see it as that bold, I see it as common sense. 

Robert:  Well, and when you think about it and you describe it in its most logical and simplistic form, which is we're setting people up for success. To set them up for success, we want to level the playing field. And those people, perhaps who haven't got private school education, haven't got family members, you can give them interview practice and prep them for it. We need to support those people. And that seems blindingly obvious. And yet it doesn't happen. 

Ellie: Yeah. And so you kind of get to that place and you go, okay, so how do we help them? It's not a test, it's not exam. There isn't a right or wrong answer at the end of the day in an interview. And the young people that we assess and the way that we assess who our process is, and we made some of these shifts a couple of years ago, we don't assess on technical capability. I'm trusting that through the A levels that they've studied or the university degree they've got or the BTEC whatever is that they've got and that qualification, they've got the level of technical knowledge that they need to come to Rolls-Royce. I can then teach them, well not me personally, but we can teach them how a gas turbine works or whatever it is that they need to know from a technical capability to be able to do their job. 

What we can't teach them or what we want to unpick and explore with them as part of that process is who they are as people and what their values and behaviours are and therefore there isn't a right or wrong answer it's not a test, it's not an exam. So why wouldn't we give them the information like you would if you're going into a meeting? You'd go in knowing at work what you were about to talk about or present or what the topic of conversation would be. So that's essentially what we're doing is we're setting them up for success by saying these are the things that we're gonna be talking to you about. This is the information the assessor's gonna have. So we've not only shared the interview questions and the assessment materials, we've also shared what our scoring matrix looks like.

So we've shared essentially these are our, and these are things we're assessing and this is how they link to what we call at Rolls-Royce our behaviours. This is what a one to six rating scale looks like. Recruiters and the assessors will have what we call positive indicators and negative indicators and this is what this looks like. So now start to have a think about the skills, the behaviours, the experiences, all the great things that make you you, how you can start to structure some of those answers and then come in and have a conversation with us. And what you can't predict, and this is where people will say to you as well, what happens if that person comes in and sits there and reads a script at you? 

Robert: Well, that's right. That's what they were saying is that they're just going to get a chat GPT, type in, plug in the questions you've got. Plus, you've given a few tips in there. Chat GPT, tell me what I should say and how do I link it to the role to the behaviors. 

Ellie: So we play that through. So that's exactly what I have at work. I say, OK, OK, let's play that through. So that that candidate comes in, they've memorised it perfectly word for word. They've even turned it so it sounds conversational and it doesn't sound rehearsed. What's gonna happen when you ask a follow-up question? 

Robert: Well, that's right. They're not gonna get chatGPT out. 

Ellie: So they're either gonna be able to continue the conversation, would you know what, brilliant, because they've shown that they can use AI and digital tools to do the research because that's actually a skill and something we should be embracing within our modern world. So do you know what, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And then they've shown that they continue to hold a conversation and can continue to share their thoughts and ideas in real time in the moment, so brilliant, tick for that candidate or they crumble.

And therefore then you've got another type of route or conversation that you start to unpick with that candidate and maybe that candidate is autistic and that's why they start to struggle. But you know what we've trained our assessors in the right way to be able to then work with that candidate and understand. And we actually ask candidates now one of the questions that assessors have got as kind of a prompted follow-up is, have you used ChatGPT to help prepare your answer? And how have you maybe used that? How have you used the questions that we shared with you in advance to set you up for success as part of this interview. And what's that reflective piece? Because reflective learning and learning agility is massive. 

Robert: That's huge. 

Ellie: So again, why shouldn't we, why are we not embracing that? 

Robert: I just, to me, the whole thing is absolute common sense. It feels when you, and particularly when you describe it like that. And I think one of the key things that you said is that it's not a test. And yet I think the heritage and the reason why so few people have done this in the past, the heritage in early careers is that it is a test. There is a right or wrong answer. You have to weed people out by putting them under pressure and only those that survive, almost like a sort of squid game scenario, are the ones that really deserve to get the job at XYZ organisation. And actually, if you flip it on its head and say, actually what we're looking for, as you alluded to, is potential. And so we want to learn about that person. Then that completely changes the purpose and the dynamic of an interview, of a recruitment process. And then it frees you and allows you then to say, yeah, I'll give you a few questions because it isn't to write a wrong answer on this. So you can see the things that we're gonna look at.

And I'd like to come back in a second to the scoring bit. But the really interesting bit is that you then have these supplementary questions. And that's what I think everybody missed on the sort of social media, let's just complain about something that we don't really understand, that you're giving, you're setting people up for success, but you're not walking them through every single aspect of the program, because that would be pointless. You're then just turning them into robots and all of this, but you are making them feel comfortable and then you're allowing the skill and that's perhaps where we have to go into now, the skill of the assessors and the scoring to then be able to move beyond just the initial answer that they give you. 

Ellie: Yeah, yeah. And I come back to, again, we're an engineering company, I think about our history and what Rolls-Royce probably was years ago, and we were probably up there with some of those early career employees. And I hear it where people say, oh, it's so hard to get onto one of their processes. It's really rigorous. And I think it's rigorous in the right way, but actually I think it's super friendly and relaxed and chilled. But I go back to when I talk to candidates and I really like it in my role, I'll still go and see some of them when they come in for their assessment days and just chat to them. And they used to say to me, I've not slept last night because I've been so nervous. And you can see some of them physically shaking. And I'm thinking they're 16 years old. Some of these- 

Robert: They've never been exposed to this kind of thing. 

Elliet: They are children. Some of the young people that we are assessing, why are we making this process feel like it should be something that is fearful? Whether they get the role or not. And we talk a lot about kind of moments that matter throughout the process. Even if they don't get the role but you know what, I want them to have enjoyed the process and learned something from it. And actually thought, you know what, that was great. And actually I've learned some skills, I've learned a bit about me, I know a bit more, so I can take that onto the next one. I don't want it to be this. I'm absolutely petrified because no one's gonna perform at their best when they're absolutely petrified. Robert: You're absolutely right. And we're not coming into work absolutely petrified. And we know that anxiety reduces people's ability to show their best selves. One of the things in terms of guidance on that, because I think you're right about how you set people up for success, but one of the things that I loved, and it was a real refreshing piece of going through your guidance on your website, was one of the questions, you want to know what people's hobbies are. Yeah. And rather than the kind of traditional hobbies you'd associate with an engineering firm being listed, I saw baking, makeup and beauty, knitting, and I thought this was fantastic. I mean, if you ever want to go left of field in terms of encouraging people from different backgrounds and thinking about transferable skills, that certainly triggers a very different... I've not seen anybody on any website talk about makeup and beauty for an engineering firm as being a transferable skill. So share with me too about that advice and you're obviously encouraging people to be relaxed but you're also, it seems, trying to help them bring their best self out. 

Ellie: Yeah, and I think there's a couple of bits in that. So again, I say if you looked at me at my desk, I'm a walking pink icon some days. There isn't a typical engineer and I think some of it is breaking down the stereotypes of what we mean about engineering and particularly women in STEM. But...if I look at what the hobbies are, a lot of young people have these days in their interests. Again, when we think of the social mobility lens or the diversity lens, not all of these young people are going off to do Duke of Edinburgh, or they're not all sitting at the weekend with their BMX bike tinkering and doing things, and therefore that leads to an engineering career. Do you know what, that's perfect. 

And if you've done those things, you've got great skills, and we absolutely still want to encourage young people to come and talk about that. But if you've got, and I don't wanna just stereotype crafts to female, but the purpose of the conversation, if you've got a young female who's really into, I don't know, knitting or sewing, and she's taught herself some of those skills. Do you know what? Knitting is very similar to coding. 

Robert: Which probably not many people have thought about. I mean, I think you're right. You just have to kind of just absorb that for a second. Knitting is similar to coding. I love that. 

Ellie: If you have taught yourself to bake, you've taught yourself to follow instructions. So do you know what, actually, in some of our practical, fitter, machinist-type roles, you are following instructions, you are doing things with your hands. If you're doing, I don't know, sugar crafts, I see what some of them do in decorating cupcakes and all this kind of stuff. You can do very fiddly, complex things with your hands. So therefore, why can't you translate that to doing something with, I go back to the point of, I can teach you how to use a screwdriver and how the engine works.

But actually, if you've got that interest there, how do we spark that? And that's been a journey with our assessors to help them see that in a broader perspective. But I want a young person to come in and be able to talk about those hobbies and interests and think, and the reason we call that out in those guides is for them when they're doing the preparation, I don't want them to sit there thinking like, oh my gosh, well, because I don't fix my bike at the weekend or because my dad's not a mechanic or because I don't do it at times. Yeah, that means I now can't, I've got no examples that I can talk about.

The other part for me is the transferable nature of some of the wider topics. So one of the things that we ask them to do as part of the assessment process, and again, is shared in the guide, is they prepare a presentation, it's phrased slightly differently for different programmes, but essentially they take a topic that they are interested in, and we deliberately say, this is not something you have studied at school. It's a topic that you are interested in, and you talk about how that is then giving you skills, or it has given you insights into certain aspects of knowledge, whatever it might be and how that links to Rolls-Royce. 

So I know one of the examples we give because I'm a massive Taylor Swift fan is the impact that Taylor Swift had on the UK economy. Do you know what? If a young person came in and spoke about that, how that's then sparked their interest in economics and now they've applied to a finance apprenticeship or a commercial apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce, how brilliant that they are talking about something that they are passionate about and why that is linked totheir future studies or the topics that they're interested in. That is so much more interesting than getting them just to say, do you know what, come in and do a presentation and tell us about- 

Robert: Tell us  about your kids at Edinburgh or- 

Ellie: Or something to do with Rolls Royce or a topic that you learn at school because you're just gonna get 10 presentations that are the same. Whereas we see young people talking about Taylor Swift, we see them talking about the football club they're interested in. We had a young lad who came in and talked about how he'd learned the Rubik's Cube and about the skills he learned from doing that and why that would make him a brilliant Rolls Royce apprenticeship. They come in doing Pokemon trading cards, like the things that we see, all of a sudden you've got a young person talking about something that they're really passionate about. Well, now they're more relaxed, now they're excited, now they're engaged, and now you can unpick what their values, behaviours, and transferable skills are, which is gonna make you then ultimately get the best talent that you want for your programs. 

Robert: I love all of that. And very, very different kind of thinking, and you referred to it earlier, that actually there's probably quite a few people in Rolls Royce who would have raised eyebrows when you said you were gonna do this. So how did you bring about that change there? Because that's the hardest bit on there. You can be passionate about it and you can sing from the hilltops about it, but if the rest of the organisation don't wanna buy into it or you haven't got support or whatever it might be, so how did you go about that?

Ellie: Yeah, so I think there's a couple of things. I think I'm very lucky that I do have some really great allies across our organisation, whether they be other people in kind of people type roles or inclusion roles or actually out in kind of engineering roles. So I always say to people, work out who your allies are and how you can take them on some of the journey with this. But I'm also a real kind of like, just go for it. And what's the worst that's gonna be, what's the worst that's gonna happen? Do you know what, we might do something and one year we go, this has gone horribly wrong. But we don't work in life or death. So actually we can probably recover from it and we can adapt as we go. But the best thing that's gonna happen is that you're gonna see some fantastic talent coming through. 

So I think it's about building relationships with the right people and the people that support you in these processes, whether that be assessors or people in the business or whatever that kind of looks like in an organisation. But it's about, I think, leading with real purpose, real excitement, sharing the story and the vision and going, do you know what, we're just gonna go for it and be bold. And I spent a lot of time saying to sometimes engineers, trust us, we're the experts in this world. And you hear their feedback and their concerns and we don't change everything overnight. We've done some changes in each year, but this, I absolutely didn't go around asking everyone's permission and buying and kind of seeking out. I kind of said, do you know what, we're doing it. 

Robert:  Yeah, we think it's the right thing to do. You must have had a few naysayers around the organisation going, Ellie's gone off on a second. She's gone one step too far. 

Ellie: I think they're probably used to me by this. By this point, I think, like you say, I think it's people's understanding. I think people, when you play it out and you say, hang on a second, actually we're giving them the right tools to come in and be prepared. So you as an assessor can have a better conversation with them. They then get it. So I think it's about how you share whatever it is you're trying to achieve, it's about how you share that in the right way and get the right people involved. But I am very fortunate to work for an organisation where D&I is a real hot topic and people are really behind it. And so again, linking it back to kind of levelling that playing field and supporting your people from those socioeconomic backgrounds, for example, again, really helps those that maybe can't relate to the, oh, well, I'd help my kids prepare. So it helps kind of put it into context for them. 

Robert: And you're so right about that, because one of the things that I just found extraordinary over the last 10 years or so is that you've had lots of organisations, all passionate about DE and I and going, putting stuff on their website. Anybody can apply, we want people from all backgrounds. And then, and that all sounds nice. And then when they come into the recruitment process, they're not set up for success at all. And so it's all wasted that kind of messaging. So unless you really think it through, and I talk about the golden thread here, unless you really think it through from your attraction to how the recruitment process backs up, and I think levelling the playing field is such an important one, and it's very interesting when you take a lens on a process from a perspective of are we levelling the playing field? Are we really making it fair? As opposed to...

We just had a ton of people in and we just could find whatever way we can to sift that out, because we're inundated and we haven't got time to look at all the applications. And I think that's one of the interesting perspectives that you've given on this. What is, because one of the, just on this topic, because you shared a bit, you know, the people will be sceptics about, oh, if you give them the questions in advance, they'll use ChatGPT. Have you found AI has, because you've set the guides up in the right way, or did you have to make some iterations from that in order to deal with the advent of ChatGPT and people wanting to turn up with a pre-scripted set of answers?

Ellie:  Yeah, so I think the fact that all of our questions we ask young people to draw on examples. And we've brought in those examples, like I say, so it's not just your Duke of Edinburgh's or your clubs or whatever, actually, it could be, do you know what, it could be caring for a younger brother or sister or an elderly relative. 

I think that ChatGPT doesn't know you, so you have to make it personal. So I think there's a level of that in there. But we actively call out in some of the communications that we send in, in the guide saying if you're using ChatGPT, use it for a foundation, use it to gather some research as a tool like you would anything else, like you'd Google something or you'd TikTok it or whatever young people do now when they research. Use that as a tool and then we want to know about you. So put your spin on it. And I think doing it in that way, again, some of the kind of anecdotal candid feedback we've had from candidates so far this year is they feel like they can come in and share themselves. So they don't feel like they need to try and get the perfect answer. Cause we're almost saying to them, well, we don't want a perfect answer. We want you to come in and be you. And I think so through actually sharing stuff, it's almost had the reverse effect. If they don't feel the need to go and use ChatGPT to feel polished, cause they can see actually, we're not looking for a polished person. And so it's kind of had that, which is an unintended, I guess, kind of consequence of this, I didn't quite think that it would kind of go that far. So yeah, that's been really interesting to see that. 

Robert: And I think whenever you do something new and different, you you were saying earlier, you kind of go through your mind, all the ifs and what's and buts as to how it might work through, but you can't anticipate everything. What are the things that were sort of unintended or unexpected? Were there any other unexpected either positive or negative that you've had to kind of learn or iterate or change since introducing this? 

Ellie: I think we've had so much positive feedback actually from parents and teachers, which I never thought it was gonna land badly with them, but I think particularly teachers and all the pressure they have around just trying to, I guess, support and teach you and people the things they need to teach them. They found it really useful to help when they're guiding. And the guides don't just cover actually what happens at an assessment centre, we've got another one that's around kind of preparing to apply and being really kind of clear around the application process and what you might expect from a virtual assessment versus a face-to-face assessment because we've got different assessments for different programs. And they found that really useful in supporting young people. So that's been, again, a really nice kind of change and positive. I think the other thing is that I'm just seeing young people come in with a different mindset. And even really simple things. So we've called out that if you don't have, you don't know what to wear to the assessment centre, wear your school uniform. 

Robert: Oh, okay. So you don't have to think about- 

Ellie: You don't have to, yeah. So we've said, you know what, wear your school uniform. So wear something that you feel comfortable in, or your school uniform or whatever. And we've given some examples. And all of a sudden we've seen young people turning up a lot in school uniforms or in, and honestly, again, they just feel more relaxed. They feel like they're kind of coming in and they can be themselves. And I just don't know why you wouldn't want to create that as an environment so that you can get the best out of our people. 

Robert: I am so in favour of giving that guidance to support young people. I've just done a couple of recent sessions with students in London and also in Leeds. And their biggest worry is what can they do, what can't they do, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, what does good look like as well? And actually a lot of the time you go to a lot of career sites and it's just, oh, you can practice the assessment, but that's, that's not setting the context of it up. And, and I think what's, what's really impressive about your guide is that it is so thorough and so detailed that if you really want to know what you're going to experience, you can see it there. And if you want to prepare in the right way, you can, you've got all the information that you need. 

The one question that I imagine must also happen though is I did everything that you asked me to do in the guide Ellie but you still rejected me so did that I mean that's partly a normal kind of challenge around this but is you know when you give so much information away and you think hang on but I've ticked all these boxes and I still not got it did you have any challenges around.

Ellie: You know we've not had that yet but we are we are mid-recruitment cycle, so watch me go back to the office tomorrow. I'll have that exact question. I think we've put a lot of time and investment into the feedback that we give young people as well. So I mentioned earlier about what we kind of call moments that matter. So we did some work last year around designing our end-to-end process, not around a process and not around process efficiencies and around what are the moments that matter to that individual that's coming through.

So one of them was, do you know what a moment that matters is when they get that pack and they instantly feel relaxed? So that's where some of this kind of work and thinking came from. But another moment that matters is the point where you ring them up and you, I say it's like the golden buzzer moment on Britain's Got Talent. You ring them and you tell them they've got onto the apprenticeship or the graduate program. But another moment is the moment you might ring them and tell them they haven't. Yes. And we can't underestimate the impact of what that moment is.

So we've put a lot of time and effort into going, well, wherever that moment falls in the process, whether it's the pre-assessment centre, post-assessment centre, what is the experience that individual then has and how do we support them? And so I would like to think, because of the great work that my team do through rejecting a candidate and then sharing what other options there might be, what the next steps might look like and how we might continue to engage them as part of wanting to come and work with Rolls-Royce. Hopefully, we're setting them up for them success, for another step. And therefore it's not a, yes, it's a difficult conversation but it's not a sad conversation or it's not always a negative conversation in the way that it might traditionally have been. Great. 

Robert: And I really like that idea of looking at your process and thinking about the moments that matter. Because for a lot of time, you applied for a job and you got zero feedback, let alone, you know the moments that matter all the way through, but it's interesting, again, taking that lens of what's it like for a candidate to go through this. The number of times I've heard people say, oh, I've made the application form as complicated and as long as possible, and if they can't be bothered to fill it in, then clearly they weren't that committed to the job. When you hear that, you go, well, hang on, you're not looking it through the lens of a student who is probably applying for 30 or 40 jobs trying to study at the same time, usually in their final year, so they might have exams as well. And so reframing that to what's it like for them, I think again allows you to really challenge the way that we've done things in the past. 

Okay, so you're halfway through the campaign. So you've had some good feedback from teachers. I imagine you've had some good feedback from candidates too. But we don't quite know as to, yeah, because you've got to flow that through as to what kind of impact it's made on the quality of people or do you, are you starting to see actually, we've seen an uptick now in diversity or...the other things that you were trying to achieve? 

Ellie: Yeah, so I said the final big numbers will be things like your D&I numbers at the end of the campaign. And we've only gone live this week with some more of our apprenticeship programmes. So I think it's a little bit too early for me to see whether that's made some massive significant kind of impact. I'll also be really interested to see it from a funnel perspective. So we talk a lot about actually, have we got maybe more diverse candidates coming through from application to assessment because they've had more time to prepare because they understand what we're looking for. And then actually have we seen more of them than be successful at assessment centre and kind of X, Y, and Z. So that'll be some of the stuff we unpick during the summer and to see where we can make kind of further improvements. 

But I think on immediate effect, we've definitely not seen the calibre go down and we've definitely not, what's kind of been shared with me anecdotally isn't worrying feedback. It's actually, you know, we've run an assessment centre and all 10 candidates that we saw, we're gonna offer two. And again, other people go to me like, oh my gosh, but why would you want that? But why wouldn't you want that? 

Robert: You definitely would want that. 

Ellie: Why would you only want to get two from an assessment centre? Cause it's gonna cost you time and money to go and run another one, trust me. So why not invest in, and this is where I come back to, don't worry about what your application number is. Don't focus on when we need to get loads and loads of applications so that we can then try and sift the best whatever out. And we want this one in 10 or all of these horrible stats I hear banded around. Actually, if my application numbers go down that doesn't worry me. 

Robert: I know, it's just such a bizarre metric, isn't it? 

Ellie: Yeah, what I really want is to have young people coming into the process knowing what the behaviours are that Rolls-Royce look at. We talk about mindset skills now a lot, so we talk about how we're assessing for mindset skills, we're assessing for behavioural skills. Coming into our processes, knowing and understanding that about themselves, how they articulate that to us, and then whether we're an employer that they want to work for. 

Robert: And one other way. I don't know whether you track that towards is completion numbers too? Have you seen any change in people dropping out of the process this year compared to last year? Cause that's another way of saying, we encouraging people to feel more comfortable. 

Ellie: Yeah, so yeah, that's one of the metrics that we track. So I've not seen anything again, nothing seemed to be worrying or alarm. I would say no news is good news if they're not sharing stories with me and we're also starting to look at work readiness this year and how we could measure that. And so actually whether some of this early investment that we're doing right at the start of the process around behaviours and skills and doing people and understanding what that means at Rolls-Royce and in the context of Rolls-Royce, whether that then has an impact as part of our kind of onboarding process and through to induction and helping kind of set them up for success. 

So not quite there yet with what the measures look like and how we unpick it, but again, it's that continual journey. It's not as just breaking things down into processes, which for some reason, sometimes we like to do in- 

Robert: We do in engineering and it's a normal way to look at things. But what I found so refreshing from your approach and what you've shared with us so far is that sometimes you do just have to experiment and it may not go according to what you hope for.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's been a failure or it's a bad thing to do. It just means it hasn't quite gone in the way that we wanted it to. And so what do we learn from it? And I think a lot of the time, it's interesting in the IT department, they get budgets to innovate and experiment. I have never come across a budget line in a TA budget that says permission to experiment, here's 10,000 pounds you really have to say, actually I'm comfortable with doing that, but we've not normally been allowed to do that in TA. Why do you think that's the case? Do you, I mean, it seems to me that you're happy to change the status quo, but there are lots of people who worry about doing that. So if you've got any tips or advice, or why do you think that might be holding people back?

Ellie: People worry about the quality of candidates. Yeah. And that's why I hear quite a lot. And they also think Rolls Royce has got absolutely massive budget. And I can tell you now, creating an interview guide and putting it on, your career's website, A does not cost a lot of money and B we do not have massive, massive budgets to do this kind of thing. But yeah, I think people really worry about the kind of the quality of the candidate and how we build the most rigorous, rigorous process because all of a sudden we've got the business who is our customer in this if we kind of get really black and white about it, and we've got to deliver this quality candidate to them. And that's kind of what we get marked on. Again, another kind of shift that we've, I guess we've made at Rolls-Royce in the wider kind of emerging talent context is we own that process end to end. So my role now goes right through to the point that that person finishes the program. So when we talk and we map about experience, I don't wave them off. 

Robert: No, chucking it over the wall to somebody else. 

Ellie: You know what? And I think that's what it is. We sometimes think in TA, we've got to hand this quality candidate over on day one. So I think that's a new shift is whether you can make that change in your organisation or if you can't, how do you better create that line of thread all the way through to the endpoint. But we talk to the business now, but actually we're gonna deliver you someone who has got our enterprise skills. They've got the right mindset skills, the right behaviour skills.

And so trust yourself in creating a process to deliver that. And don't get fixated on an engineer or an IT person or a finance person or whatever. It's kind of like marking your homework on this really perfectly qualified young person that you're gonna hand over because you're not. That's the point of going on a development program is to develop those skills or behaviours or get that qualification, whatever it is.

I would say you're going on an apprenticeship, you're going to gain the technical skills that you want. What we're looking for is a young person coming in who's got the excitement and the passion and the energy and the learning agility and can act as a change agent and he's gonna kind of drive all the softer human skills that we're looking for at Rolls-Royce. So I think it's kind of giving yourself permission to reframe what your service is as an HR, TA, L and D person, whatever it is. Actually, you know what? You're an expert. So create a process that you're really comfortable with to deliver your end-to-end early career and medium-time journey.

Robert It's a brilliant piece of advice too, because if you summarise that bit, what ultimately you're saying is, let's have confidence in ourselves that you are the expert. And you alluded to that earlier too, when talking to the hiring manager, saying, trust me, this is my space, this is how I know how to do this. And I'll explain to you why this will benefit you, but you have to trust me. And to some extent then you need that self-confidence that I can do this and it may not work perfectly, but it will be better. I've got to be on this journey to make something better. And if you're not trying to make it better, then you end up in the status quo and nobody wants that, particularly with the skills shortage that we've got now. 

My final, final question is, I saw that your title has changed to emerging talent. And this is a very interesting idea, Ellie, isn't it? We're no longer early careers now. We're thinking about solving the skills crisis in a different way. So just tell me how you ended up at something you initiated, but what does emerging talent mean?

Robert: Yeah, so I'll try and do this in a nutshell rather than a long-winded answer, but essentially emerging talent is broader than just early career. So...I always say to people, because again, you can kind of see the allergic reaction that everyone had. Also, oh my gosh, we don't do graduates and apprentices anymore. Like, no, no, no, no. That's a massive part of what we mean by emerging talent. But emerging talent is about focusing on the skills that we need as an organisation for the future. So it drives two levers. It drives D&I and how we get more diverse talent into our organisation, but it also drives the skills that we need for the future. And it's a long-term lever. 

This isn't about...oh well, I've got a really short-term skills gap now so I'm gonna drop in an apprenticeship. It's about what are the long-term skills that we want to bring in and how do we do that through hiring diverse and developing diverse talent. And that might be graduate and apprenticeship talent but actually that might be other. 

Robert: Well it's like it could be people from alternative pathways that you're just bringing in and you can teach them the skills. 

Ellie: So the second you flip that mindset, all of a sudden you lose what we put up in our world as a weird barrier that we go, okay, well, when we talk about graduates and apprentices, all of a sudden they've got to have left school at a certain age or they've got to finish university at a certain age and they've got to have a piece of paper with a qualification on, which is very important for some roles and is the next kind of natural step for some roles. 

But actually, it's not about that. It's about us finding the people that have got the right skills or have got the learning agility to develop their skills in a certain way or maybe they've got the right behaviours or the right values. And therefore, how do we have a wider talent pool of people? So in a nutshell, emerging talent is about capturing people who are early in their stages of career or industry and have got the right skills, behaviours, values to want to come and work at Rolls-Royce. 

That ultimately is graduates and apprentices, but also absolutely captures career changes, alumni, I say, veterans, people that maybe haven't actually been to work. Do you know what, they left school at 18, they had their family young and now they want to have their time, but they've not really got those formal qualifications. It could be, I keep using this example, but a young person who left school, yeah, they've got their GCSEs or whatever, they've kind of gone and worked in the local supermarket, maybe they've worked their way up, now they're a store manager. Do you know what, that person has got some fantastic skills why couldn't they come into Rolls-Royce and why couldn't we support them in gaining the technical skills? And that's why I talk about it in these kind of buckets. They've got their mindset skills, they've got their behavioural skills. We can then give them on a formalised program, the technical skills for them to go and fly and do what it is that we kind of need to do. So emerging talent isn't, hasn't got the same restraints I think the early career has around an exit point of education. 

Robert: Absolutely. And what I think is so exciting about that development, for the last couple of years, I've been a strong advocate that people who've been running early careers programs really understand about how you hire for potential and you develop potential. 

And in a world where skills are rapidly changing, we know in many sectors there is a skill shortage. You can't just do it through graduates and apprentices you're gonna have to find people from other careers, returners, and it's so exciting to see organisations like Rolls Royce, we've been doing some work with Siemens and Molson Coors as well, where Siemens ended up, similar to kind of your story, hiring for a project engineer, somebody who came from Aldi. And this was a lady who had all the right skills, or… transferable skills to learn what she was going to need to be a project manager and engineer at Siemens. And it was just a question of putting her into that emerging talent training program, even though she had some experience in another sector. But that, you know, the way to deal with social mobility is to really encourage our recruitment processes to be open.

to people from alternative pathways, and alternative career paths. Molson Coors were hard for a technical supervisor, somebody who'd been a carer, but been looking after, and then was just coming back into work, like you were saying. There's so many great people out there that are being overlooked, unless we take a different approach. 

Ellie: Yeah, and I bet we all know someone in our lives who will say, oh, well, I made it up the hard way because I don't have a degree or I left school or whatever. And we'll all know someone we can name and we'll probably look at that person and go, but you know what, they're absolutely amazing at their job. I then look at that job or I look at some of those mid-career experience high roles that we would attract for at Rolls-Royce and they can't apply because we've said you need a degree or you need X years of experience or whatever. But you look at the job and you look at the person in your head that you know somewhere else and you think, oh, but so and so my friend or whatever, my brother, or we'd be brilliant in that role. 

That's essentially what it is that we're doing. So we're not stopping the experience higher. We still need experienced engineers or commercial officers or whatever it is. But where we've got skill shortages, why are we not tapping into a different route of bringing in talent? And I think that is the only way, A, we're gonna kind of fix the skill shortages and challenges that we're gonna see kind of the future. But it's the only way I think we're gonna really shift to a skills-based organisation and an organisation that's got kind of this accelerated approach to how we move talent and move skills around because we're gonna create people that can learn different skills and have that learning agility and that kind of mindset that we need. So yeah, we're experimenting with it at the moment. And again, learning absolutely as we go, not the only company that's doing it, but yeah, 100% I think is the way forward and what is needed.

Robert: Well, you know, long may all the good things that you're doing last, Ellie, because they are going to make a huge difference. And one of the things that I've learned over the years that change only comes about because bold people are prepared to challenge the status quo, do something a bit different and, you know, take that chance, albeit carefully thought through. And then sure enough, the world doesn't collapse, the sky doesn't fall in, and we move forward. And so the work that you've been doing and what you've just described here is just fantastic in terms of changing mindsets. And when a company like Rolls Royce is doing that, then you know the rest of the world is gonna start to listen and hopefully change. It's been great talking to you, Ellie. 

Ellie: That's all right. Thank you for having me.