Congratulations to Maria Hawley and our early careers team for being shortlisted for the prestigious HR Excellence Awards. These awards showcase best practice and offer a fantastic opportunity for us to celebrate our HR professionals and initiatives.
Spanning 19 categories, the awards celebrate HR professionals who, despite coming from organisations of all shapes and sizes, have a common goal: pushing the boundaries in people strategy.
Maria, HR Director, joined us in 2012 and has over 20 years’ experience. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and has overall responsibility for our people strategy. Maria joined us as a sole HR practitioner supporting 220 employees and 8 offices. She now leads a team of 14, covering the full HR spectrum, meeting the needs of our 750+ employees.
She initiated ‘Business Blend’, our colleague pairing system that randomly brings two colleagues together monthly to have a 30-minute chat to get to know each other and learn about different reams. Starting as a Covid-19 initiative, its popularity has now seen more than 3,400 matches take place since October 2020 with around 80% of employees enrolled.
Amanda Davies, Senior HR Manager, said: “Maria has unfalteringly supported my progression and personal development. Coming into HR later in my career, she always encouraged and championed my individuality and different perspective. Today, she is just as passionate about diversity of thought, not only within the HR team but across the business. We all know she is one in a million and feel extremely lucky to call her our HR Director.”
We have also been shortlisted for the best early careers strategy category. Our talent acquisition and graduate teams collaborate to deliver an early careers strategy that supports more than 100 graduates, one-year placements and summer placements, making up more than 10% of our workforce.
Our early careers strategy is split into two priorities: developing existing graduates and widening access to careers in property. The graduate programme strikes an effective balance between individual training needs and business priorities, combining one-on-one support with group training.
Our Insight Programme, now in its second year, is a twice-yearly virtual programme which is open to all students not currently studying a property or real estate degree. It includes sessions on a variety of topics including CV writing, emotional intelligence and interview skills, alongside technical activities. Four programme alumni have now joined our graduate scheme in 2022 and overall non-cognate university representation has increased to 37.5%, up from 14% in 2021.
Partner, Ruth Ofield, who heads up our graduate team, said: “We are thrilled to have been shortlisted. We have invested heavily in our early careers programme, and we are reaping the rewards. We have a long-term average pass rate for graduates of 98.2% compared to an industry standard of sub-70%. Return on investment is reputational - our student intake has increased c. 10% year-on-year for the last five years and during the pandemic, it increased by 22%, providing our largest ever intake with over 400 applications.
“The percentage of sandwich placements who return for graduate jobs is currently 93%. This decreases graduate recruitment costs by filling a portion of roles early on. Around 30% of current Partners and 49% of Associate Partners started with us as graduates and this is testament to the strength of the programme and subsequent progression opportunities.”
The awards ceremony will be held Tuesday 6 December 2022 at The Brewery in London.
Click here to find out more about our early careers programmes.
