Ongoing discussions with hiring managers and successful candidates from broadcaster ITV’s first-ever formal graduate programme will be key in moving forward to 2013’s second intake.

Ten graduates joined in commercial, corporate (finance and HR) and creative production roles in October 2012 following an April launch of the scheme. Head of recruitment Catherine Schlieben told Recruiter the firm “will hope to be launching slightly earlier in March [2013]”, as April was slightly late for 2012, with final-year university students already pre-occupied with dissertations and revision.

As part of the planning process for 2013, January sees Schlieben speaking with the line managers who took on 2012 graduates, having already spoken individually with the grads themselves “from a very practical perspective on what they found and what we could improve”.

ITV has also analysed which sources the hires came from, she added. “What we’re doing from a recruitment and attraction perspective is looking at where they predominantly came from… for those who were offered a role, social media played a huge part,” she explained.

One piece of feedback from candidates tallied with Schlieben’s hopes for the scheme, she explained: “The key selling point for us — and fortunately the graduates said they got this and liked it — is that they are doing ‘real’ roles with real responsibilities; this is a real job that somebody else in the business does, who’s not on that graduate programme.”

Schlieben conceded that this can be problematic — she was unable to confirm which business areas may be added to this year’s stream, saying: “One of the downsides of having the graduates do ‘real’ jobs in this business is that headcount needs to be allocated to them, which can be a tricky conversation with finance sometimes.”

Having concrete benchmarks in place for 2013 contrasts with the approach of the start-up year. “First year was ‘let’s suck it and see’ — generally the culture at ITV is quite flexible and people were quite open to it,” Schlieben said. “But I wouldn’t say we went out and just said ‘give it a go’; there was a firm business plan.”