I have been in Human Resources all my career. I started out completing my BSc and MSc in Human Resource Management from London South Bank University and Copenhagen Business School.
At worked at various roles within HR and recruitment. I had a long stint at Accenture as a recruitment specialist and then afterwards joined Demant initially with a focus on recruitment of various specialist and management profiles within Engineering, R&D, Quality and Marketing.
➔ Hiring! Demant are hiring graduates right now. Click here for more details on the programme.
Now I’m responsible for recruitment and recruitment for the graduate programme. The graduate programme is very season specific, so I spend almost a 100% of my time when that is going on, but then once they are hired I can also shift my attention to other recruitment tasks.
What is the story of the Demant Graduate program?
It was launched in 2014 so we are running on our 7th year. I was only part of the graduate programme for the last 2 years so I can’t take all the credit :). At a high level then I think the programme has remained relatively unchanged, but we have made smaller changes along the way.
We decided to launch the graduate programme to have a focus on young talents. Demant is a very complex business and it takes time to really get your head around how it all works together. The graduate programme develops talents that will have a very good understanding of the entire business and are therefore given an amazing foundation for their future career at the company.
Why do you have a graduate program?
As mentioned above then it’s a vital talent pipeline for us. It’s a way to ensure we can attract the best graduates – both specialist and graduates with managerial ambitions. The programme has buy-in from our senior management and we have annual meetings to share the progress with the programme and highlight the kind of graduates we are getting in. We have been very satisfied with our graduate programme and the people we have gotten in – it’s a very established programme internally.
What kind of graduates are you trying to attract?
We offer a broad range of roles and as such we accept almost all education degrees into our programmes. We take a very holistic view on applicants and while grades are one factor, we also value experience outside of university a lot.
We want applicants that are curious, don’t mind being thrown into different projects and someone who is fun working with. You might enter as a talent, but you need to be humble as well and appreciate that you still have a lot to learn.
The best thing about the program?
I think the fact that our senior management owns the programme and is so bought into it is a huge benefit for us and the graduates. I will also mention that the graduates ability to connect across programmes is something that always impresses me. It’s great to see graduates with different educational backgrounds and interests get together.
Areas where you are still trying to improve the experience?
We are constantly trying to improve and we run feedback sessions each year to get the feedback from the graduates. Last year we were discussing the opportunity to have more training as part of the graduate programme, so this year we are doing training programmes around project management and stakeholder management.
You might enter as a talent, but you need to be humble as well and appreciate that you still have a lot to learn
What other graduate programmes do you admire?
Demant is part of a graduate programme network with other companies. We meet once a quarter to discuss how we are going about our programmes and hear how others are doing. It’s great to be able to spar with other companies.
Fun fact about your graduate program?
Our current CEO Søren Nielsen started his career as a trainee in Demant
➔ Hiring! Demant are hiring graduates right now. Click here for more details on the programme.
