A&N Media, the consumer media company of the Daily Mail Group Trust (DMGT), which is comprised of the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday and a host of well-known brands, is leveraging the power of those brands to develop a distinctive graduate recruitment strategy. Other brands within DMGT include Metro, the London Evening Standard and job board Jobsite.

A&N Media launched its first graduate scheme for disciplines such as creative and marketing in September, with the closing date this month. So far, the company has received more than 120 applications for 10 positions, learning and development manager Laggi Diamandi told Recruiter. 

Diamandi said that as a media organisation the company was in the position of being able to promote the new programme through its brands. “We haven’t had to go out to agencies and specialists who find you graduates,” he said.

And because working in the media was also “very attractive” to graduates, neither did it need to compete head on with other graduates recruiters such as Deloitte and the investment banks by running large-scale campus campaigns. The emphasis was on using the group’s resources internally, he added. 

The focus was on quality and not quantity, said Catherine Rush, A&N’s head of talent. “We know what good looks like,” she said, describing how HR had developed a profile of the ideal graduate from a composite of the best 15 graduates taken on previously outside any formal graduate programme.

“We have built this almost super-human graduate profile that we benchmark against,” Rush explained. Some of the traits were “high potential, ability to shake up the place, not be afraid of giving their opinion, a real go-getter and having insight”. 

Rush added that because of the strict entry requirements, including 320 Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) points [allocated for entry to higher education], only 30% of those who were interested enough to look at the programme’s web page were taking their interest any further.