ENHANCING THE TALENT POOL

CSR Story

ENHANCING THE TALENT POOL

Nestlé Needs YOUth

Two years ago, Cavinne Gooding – UWI, St Augustine class valedictorian and national scholarship winner – found herself fresh out of university, working outside her field in a job that she couldn’t see becoming a career. She had hurdled a double major and was pursuing a Master’s degree after work, when she heard that Nestlé Anglo-Dutch Caribbean’s Trinidad and Tobago office was looking for management trainees. She decided to make a movie.

Gooding’s video submission, the first step in a thorough interview process for the Nestlé Needs YOUth (NNY) programme, was one of hundreds received by the company’s Human Resources staff, many of them from over-qualified applicants who wanted to get in the door. “What attracted me was the interview process,” recalls Gooding, now a year-and-a- half into a two-year rotation at Nestlé’s Finance and Control Department. “From right off the bat it told me that it was something different. You had to do a video of ‘why you’, and that tapped into my skill, so I did a real kind of movie production.”

The NNY programme certainly seeks Nestlé’s interest by casting about for the best and brightest between the ages of 16 and 29, but it also wants to influence and enhance the entire talent pool in whatever little ways it can. “The whole point is that we, of course, cannot hire everyone,” says Recruitment and Employer Branding Manager, LaToya Birmingham. “But we want to increase the employability of youth.”

For the moment, Nestlé Anglo-Dutch Caribbean has focused on rolling out NNY in key markets where youth unemployment is highest and it’s likely to have the most impact. Beyond T&T, the programme is up and running in Jamaica, Barbados and Guyana, with plans to expand to St Lucia this year.

Birmingham knows that young people are potential customers, but she’s also mindful of the company’s CSR mandate. “If our consumers are not working, or not being employed in a fruitful way, it affects everyone. The community around us is not going to be self-fulfilling. So that’s where the youth employment comes in and that’s why it’s such a key focus for creating Shared Value.”

NNY outreach involves career workshops that impart simple skills, like helping job seekers craft effective résumés and career development plans. It also instils an appreciation of mentorship, which means finding that person with the experience and insight willing to steer them towards good choices.

NNY has harnessed Nestlé’s in-house talent to spread the message about their company and how-to-stand-out in the wider working world. Management trainee Melanie Edmund, 18 months into her two-year rotation in Supply Chain, attended NNY’s “World of Work” at the University of the West Indies. “What I appreciate most about Nestlé Needs YOUth is that it’s not only targeted for you to have a career in Nestlé per se, but it would give you the skills and experience that you would need to be more employable throughout whichever sector, throughout whichever market.”

Gooding also passes on her 24-year-old insights to students standing apprehensively at the threshold of the working world. She knows what it was like, being in their shoes and craving opportunity. She also appreciates the benefits of full- time mentorship. “So much of what you do in school is theory, theory, theory,” she says. “And you don’t see it put into practice. And to come into an organisation and see your books come to life or everything that you learned actually being applied in the real world and somebody to explain it to you and not just expect you to do it… Your job is to learn. Your job is to sit with the person who knows it all and let them explain, this is how it’s done.”

As the lead on NNY, Birmingham has a ready insight into her target market’s needs and anxieties. She’s not far-removed in age, studied psychology, and spent a year and a half looking for work herself. Presenting the programme to her younger self, she has a couple key takeaways. “It’s about talking to students about how you humble yourself to take every opportunity: That one job you hated may open a door somewhere else. I tell them, ‘Apply yourself and people will see your work ethic.’ ”

Internships do lead to places young interns hardly expected. Mechanical engineer Hardeo Mithoon’s attitude was “so great” that Birmingham offered him a job in sales, where he used his aptitude for numbers to forecast his future sales. He now has a permanent job.

Through NNY, Nestlé has also been partnering with entities that share its commitment to youth employment – businesses, government agencies and tertiary education institutions. A recent career development workshop with interns from advertising agency Lonsdale Saatchi & Saatchi saw knowledgeable young people with little workplace experience benefiting from insight into Nestlé operations and career opportunities. The agency says its interns benefited most from a CV-writing session, “a skill not necessarily taught in schools.”

Career prep fits nicely into Nestlé’s goal of employing more locals. Jobs at the multinational that were once staffed by expatriates are now being filled by T&T nationals. “We have that skilled labour here” says Birmingham. “We have it. And we have the educational facilities here to produce the talent that we need, so why don’t we use it?”