The Royal Mint, which has minted British coins for more than 1,000 years, is opening its doors to graduates to help ‘grow its own’ talent.

Anne Jessopp, the Royal Mint’s business services director, told Recruiter the South Wales-based organisation had difficulties recruiting locally for marketing and engineering skills, for example, and developed a three-year graduate programme to ensure it had those skills for the future.

“As part of our succession planning and talent review, [we] really looked at areas where we wanted to grow our own.

“Specifically, we’ve looked at areas that we find it difficult to recruit locally… and what we wanted to do is bring people in who could move up and through the organisation.”

The team has also begun trialling recruiting in-house, thanks to the rise in popularity of social sites such as LinkedIn, although it still uses agencies. 

The firm has just launched its graduate recruitment drive for this year, hoping to take on three people, adding to the six it took on last year. The graduates taken on last year entered roles in marketing, operations, finance and supply chain departments. 

She added the aspect making it even harder for the organisation to recruit was its thoroughness. 

“We need to make sure they don’t just have the technical skills but that they are the right cultural fit, too. Even for the most junior roles, we do an assessment centre-type process… so any difficulty, in a sense, is made of our own volition because we want the absolute right person for us.”

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