Recruiting into entry level positions in health has been a real problem for years. When I first started the Graduates into Health programme, one of things that struck me was the high number of managers – regardless of organisation type or business function – that kept saying they just couldn’t recruit to band 3 – 5 roles.

They would place an advert on NHS jobs and 180 applicants would apply. It would take three days to go through short-listing, and if they managed to get five candidates scheduled for interview, most wouldn’t turn up and for those that did, they just didn’t have the skills. This meant having to re-advertise.

All this time and energy to find a suitable band 3-5 role. This just wasn’t working.

The other thing that struck me was how we got inundated at University careers fairs from graduates once they started to realise the NHS could have a career for them in IT, HR, Finance etc. And the thanks we got for helping them find their first role out of them was heart-warming.

The NHS doesn’t have a brand issue – it’s working just fine. What we didn’t have was the right mechanism to get to our graduates. That’s where we were falling down. We now have a solution, we have a mechanism that is working, and it’s so very simple. It’s Graduates into Health programme.

We have over 1,000 students and graduates on our books, clambering to start their career in the NHS/healthcare sector and have access to 1,000s more across London and South East. They want to work with us, we just need to pick them up, before some other employer does – don’t we deserve to have the brightest talent coming out of our universities?

Written by Graduates into Health programme manager Louise Brennan