Agency Graduate Programs Part 1.

Hiring juniors can be challenging. More and more agencies seem to be swearing off it. I still won't shut up about how fantastic our grad program was when I ran Alpha Digital.

A grad program is a great idea in theory. A structured way to bring new talent into the industry, shape them early, and build a pipeline of future leaders inside the agency.

But running a grad program well takes more thought than most people realise.

Here a few things that made the biggest difference for us.

1. Start with the problem you're trying to solve

Before designing the program, get clear on what you actually want it to achieve.

Some agencies run grad programs purely to identify great people and bring them into the business. Others are trying to solve a more specific problem.

For us, the issue was that most graduates knew they wanted to work in "digital", but they didn't know where inside digital. Paid media? SEO? Social?

That makes it difficult for the agency to place them, and difficult for them to build a career. So the structure we designed was based around rotation.

For the first six months, grads rotated through the three main parts of the agency, spending two months in each team. At the end of that period, they nominated the area they were most interested in, and we tried to match that with the agency's needs.

We borrowed that model from law firms, which have been doing rotations like this for years.

The outcome was simple but worked well. People ended up in areas they were genuinely interested in and where they had already had some exposure.

2. Structure the program in two phases

Once you've defined the purpose, the next decision is the length and structure of the program. The approach that worked well for us was a 12-month program split into two halves.

The first six months were exploratory - the rotations. The second six months were about specialisation and skill development. Once grads had chosen their preferred discipline, they stayed in that team and started developing real competency in the role.

Seeing them work as part of a team and how they took to the unique challenges of agency over that period also gave us time to answer one of our key questions - is this person someone we want in the agency long term?

3. Be realistic about the impact on your team

Running a grad program is incredibly rewarding. It's also bloody time consuming.

Someone in your business will effectively be responsible for mentoring, training and guiding an entire cohort for months at a time. If you're doing rotations every couple of months, that means multiple teams repeatedly onboarding people who are effectively starting from zero.

That can be exhausting if it isn't structured properly (and tbh, is still pretty exhausting even if it is structured well). One of the most helpful things you can do early is systemise the training by:

• Recording lessons.
• Documenting processes.
• Creating resources that can be reused.
• Move from one-to-one teaching to one-to-many learning wherever possible.

Otherwise the program becomes unsustainable for the team delivering it. This has the added benefit of... well you should do all of this stuff anyway. It'll make onboarding hires at all levels easier going forward.

4. Systemise the recruitment process

If the program (and your promotion of it) works, you'll get a lot of applications. In the final years we ran ours, we had 300+ applicants for fewer than a dozen roles.

That's a great position to be in, but it creates a different problem: how do you fairly and efficiently filter that many candidates? The approach we used was:

Step 1: Objective testing Basic data analysis, spreadsheet interpretation, and problem-solving questions. Something we could easily (and automatically) assign a score to as a first filter.

Step 2: Qualitative responses Scenario questions and written answers that require human judgement. Much slower and more time consuming to mark, but a 'benchmark response' written in advance + criteria can help speed it up and ensure fairness.

Step 3: Interviews Standardised interviews across the remaining candidates.

Using a process like this means you eliminate a large portion of applicants objectively first, and only spend human time once it gets narrowed down.

We started out using Google Forms and eventually progressed to dedicated candidate screening tool Applied which was fantastic.

Part 2 covers assessment, contract structure, and the best channel to find strong applicants.