Following on from The HR World’s recent webinar, Unlocking Emerging Talent, sponsored by Connectr Talent Technology, we passed two more questions for consideration to panelists Simon Reichwald, Chief Progression Officer, Connectr Talent Technology and Jonathan De Kryger, Leader Campus Recruitment North, Human Resources, Worldline. These were their responses:
1: Do you think an employer’s EVP needs to be particularly different or promote certain areas in order to attract emerging talent?
Jonathan de Kryger: Yes, but differences must be credible, evidence-based, and closely aligned with what emerging talent truly values. The aim isn’t to reinvent the wheel every year; it’s to sharpen signals so they consistently point to opportunity, growth, and inclusion.
What to emphasize in the EVP for emerging talent:
- Purpose and impact
- Tie roles to real outcomes, not just tasks. Show how new hires contribute to meaningful customer value, sustainability goals, or social impact.
- Learning, growth, and rapid progression
- Demonstrate explicit learning paths, hands-on projects from day one, rotations across functions, and visible fast-track opportunities to higher levels.
- Skills and mobility over pedigree
- Prioritize transferable skills, real-work artifacts, and competency-based hiring rather than degrees or traditional “qualifications.”
- Flexibility and well-being
- Communicate flexible work options, sustainable workloads, mental-health support, and healthy work-life integration.
- Inclusion, belonging, and culture
- Highlight diverse routes into the company, psychological safety, mentorship, and employee-resource groups that support early-career entrants.
- Development-forward compensation and benefits
- Competitive pay with growth potential, learning stipends, tuition reimbursement, and pathways for financial wellness.
- Authentic storytelling and credible signals
- Use real early-career employee stories, campus-programs, transparent career ladders, and measurable EVP outcomes from pilots or programs.
- Signals of credibility
- Public commitments to apprenticeship programs, internships, or nontraditional-hiring pilots; documented outcomes from similar initiatives.
2: How can employers build internal confidence in hiring managers to back unconventional talent?
Simon Reichwald: Show how it aligns to the wider company or talent strategy eg:
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- Future proofing for skills
- Innovation (through diversity of thought)
- Internal mobility – Enabling all employees to grow and progress
- Inclusion
- External commitments eg military covenant
- Reduces costs eg often cheaper salary costs and better retention
- Fill resource gaps faster
- These hires want to learn and not come with baggage as to how it should be done
- Use Data
- Improved retention
- Performance
- Find existing advocates
- Case studies
- Run a myth v reality session with hiring managers
Jonathan de Kryger: There are key levers to build manager confidence but, before we move on – it is important to point out that this takes many, many months.
- Foundations: objective success criteria
- Develop role success profiles that separate must-have skills from nice-to-haves; define onboarding and probation milestones with objective measures. Take as much workload off the managers as possible.
- Evidence-based hiring framework
- Use work samples, take-home projects, or simulations that mirror real job demands; standardise interviews with behaviour-based questions and scoring rubrics. You will get a lot of candidates in, and you will have to have a robust framework on selecting the right ones on merit.
- Bias-awareness and culture
- Train managers to recognise transferable skills and cognitive flexibility; share success stories to shift mindsets away from traditional pedigrees. Additionally, the way you could hire juniors and take away workload from managers, is to actually place them under the wings of a senior or medior with leadership aspirations/ambitions. This can help them explore their leadership capabilities and scale in due time.
- Pilot-and-prove approach
- Start with a small cohort of unconventional hires in low-risk areas; compare ramp time, performance, and retention to a control group.
- Enablement and practical tools
- Provide a “manager playbook” with interview guides, evaluation rubrics, sample postings, and a transferable-skills checklist.
- Onboarding and early-career support
- Pair hires with mentors, implement a structured 90-day plan, and secure early wins to demonstrate capability. If you can and have the budget, put them on a year-long personal development plan that will help them understand themselves as a professional.
- Sponsorship and internal champions
- Establish senior sponsors and visible role models who came through nontraditional routes to reassure managers and teams.
- Governance and accountability
- Create a cross-functional steering group (HR, business leaders, DEI, L&D) to approve pilots, review results, and scale successful approaches.
- Risk mitigation and fairness
- Ensure legal and ethical guardrails, non-discrimination controls, and transparent criteria applicable to all hires.
Some closing thoughts…
An EVP tailored for emerging talent should be both aspirational and actionable. It must offer credible signals through real projects, transparent progression, and authentic storytelling that demonstrate nontraditional paths can deliver tangible business value. At the same time, organisations should codify risk management and enablement to give hiring managers the confidence to back unconventional talent as a strategic, repeatable approach rather than a one-off experiment. As in football, successful teams are always, without exception, the ones with the best academy.
