Early career recruitment faces a genuine challenge when it comes to building entry-level routes that don't depend on a particular university, degree, or CV format. Could the answer lie in moving towards values-based, strength-led assessment that surfaces genuine potential?

The landscape for early careers has changed dramatically, with just as many candidates now looking for apprenticeship opportunities as graduate training schemes, according to research from Graduate Market Trends.

Today, the traditional CV-and-grad-scheme model is falling short. That’s why our webinar discussion explored how organisations are building different kinds of entry-level routes, which you can replay here or catch up on with the summary below.

Molly Johnson-Jones, CEO and Co-Founder of Flexa, was joined by a panel of early careers talent experts:

• Eva Suiter, Early Careers Talent Acquisition Partner at United Utilities
• Cara Penny, Senior Skills & Talent Strategy Manager at Anglian Water Services
• Jack Longshaw, Early Careers Lead UK&I at Mondelēz International

Why should talent teams care?

For a long time, early careers hiring has leaned on two things: prior experience, which is famously difficult to get without a first job, and traditional graduate schemes as the default route into office-based careers. As the panel made clear, that's changing fast, and the organisations doing it well are seeing real results in both the diversity and the quality of who comes through.

Squiggly careers, even in early careers

Before getting into policy, the panel took a moment to compare their own routes into work, and the variety was striking. Molly went from investment banking and equity research into market research and data analytics before founding Flexa. Cara joined Anglian Water as a three-week temp after travelling, and 15 years later has worked across recruitment, HR systems, programme management and business partnering before landing back in early careers. Jack skipped university in favour of a year and a half in Spain and an internship in Ecuador, before discovering degree apprenticeships almost seven years ago, "before they were really becoming popular." Eva has spent 23 years across graduate recruitment in industry and at a university, joining United Utilities 18 months ago.

The point wasn't lost on the panel: none of their own paths would have looked like a strong match on paper for where they ended up.

What's actually on offer

Between them, the panel described a genuinely wide range of entry routes. Mondelēz runs traditional grad schemes and placement-year internships alongside degree apprenticeships, level two to four apprenticeships on its manufacturing sites, and a "direct entry" route for people with a couple of years' experience or none at all, currently shortlisted for an FDF award.

United Utilities takes on around 100 apprentices a year across levels two to six, roughly 50 graduates, and around 15 interns. Anglian Water is expanding too, with 30 to 40 graduates and around 130 apprentices this year, alongside two distinctive routes. Its Training School is a skills bootcamp that recruits purely on behaviours across alliance partners, and its Collaborative Skills Programme works directly with specific colleges, sponsoring courses and hiring straight from them rather than running open recruitment, with dedicated CV workshops and confidence-building support built in along the way.

Why CVs and university pedigree are losing ground

Eva was direct about why United Utilities moved away from CV-based screening: with AI now able to generate a polished CV in seconds, she questioned what a CV really tells an employer about a person, and shifted instead to application questions that surface experience beyond academic and professional history.

Cara went further, explaining that Anglian Water doesn't use CVs in early careers hiring at all.

"You're almost measuring someone's access to opportunity rather than their potential, particularly when you're looking at things like which university someone attended." — Cara Penny, Anglian Water Services

Jack described a similar shift at Mondelēz, moving recruitment focus away from traditional "red brick" universities and toward institutions with relevant courses and higher proportions of underrepresented students, a deliberate move to better reflect the demographics of Mondelēz's own consumers. CVs are still collected, but purely to confirm minimum qualifications; the real assessment runs against 11 competencies built with an external talent partner and tied directly to the company's values and leadership framework.

Redesigning the selection process itself

The detail behind these shifts was where the conversation got really practical. Cara described inviting candidates onto site for informal tours and time with managers before any formal assessment, deliberately lowering the stakes so people aren't walking into an assessment centre as complete strangers. Jack outlined a multi-stage process: CVs used only to confirm minimum criteria, followed by a mix of values-based, behavioural and gamified online testing (chosen specifically because it shows less adverse impact than traditional psychometric testing), then video interviews, and finally assessment centres redesigned around realistic day-to-day tasks rather than abstract exercises.

One change stood out: Mondelēz has moved away from competency-based, "tell me about a time when" interviewing, precisely because it's the most coachable format and tends to reward people with access to interview prep, and has moved towards strength-based interviewing instead. Assessors are also trained specifically to separate genuine potential from simple confidence and polish.

Eva described a similar principle in action at United Utilities, where the business partnered with an assessment provider, Spotted Zebra, to build a skills-based "match me" quiz mapped to the actual skills each individual apprenticeship needs, rather than a generic aptitude test. Every candidate is also invited on site before the interview, partly to assess fit both ways, and partly to think through practicalities like whether a 16-year-old candidate can realistically get there.

What actually predicts success

Asked what signals genuinely predict a strong early careers hire, none of the panel pointed to grades or a polished CV. Jack singled out volunteering as one of the strongest indicators he sees, alongside any part-time job, arguing that both demonstrate motivation and a willingness to go beyond what's required, and encouraging candidates without paid work experience to seek out volunteering specifically to build those examples.

Eva shared a memorable example: a candidate who'd led fundraising and refurbishment for his local sports club, coordinating suppliers and budgets in the process, demonstrated genuine project management skill despite it never appearing on a traditional CV.

"It's thinking outside the box in terms of your examples, and naturally not thinking it has to be a work example, or a school or university example." — Eva Suiter, United Utilities

Cara's example was even more understated: an apprentice with no formal work experience who talked, in an assessment centre, about stripping down and rebuilding a motorbike with his grandad. The problem-solving and persistence that came through, she said, told her more than any conventional CV line could have.

Filling the pipeline without relying on prestige

Attraction strategies varied widely across the three organisations. Eva and Cara both benefit from strong regional consumer brands as water companies, but layered targeted outreach on top: schools, colleges and universities across their service areas, listings on Grad Cracker and the government's apprenticeship site, and a parent-and-teacher-facing webinar at United Utilities specifically designed to demystify what an apprenticeship actually involves day to day.

Anglian Water tried open evenings for the first time last year, inviting candidates to bring family members along to see the environment for themselves, and found it significantly improved the quality, not just the volume, of applications. The organisation has also expanded work experience placements to 100 this spring and started hosting T-level students, several of whom have gone on to degree apprenticeships.

Mondelēz made the boldest change: stepping away from careers fairs entirely last year on cost-effectiveness grounds, and shifting budget instead into targeted social advertising aimed specifically at women in STEM, and reframing food manufacturing as a genuine alternative to the aerospace, defence and automotive engineering careers that dominate the Midlands. The approach that performed best of all wasn't corporate messaging, but short, candidate-filmed "day in the life" content shared by current grads and apprentices themselves.

Flexa's own data, drawn from over 72 million platform searches, backs up why authenticity matters here: contrary to the narrative that Gen Z candidates don't want to be in an office or don't care about career progression, early careers candidates actually show a higher stated preference for in-person work than the average Flexa user, and care more about culture, clarity of progression, and the tangible impact of the work than flexibility alone.

What early careers talent actually gets excited about

Asked what benefits genuinely land with early careers hires, the answers were less about pay and perks than about access and belonging. Cara described inviting early-career colleagues into board meetings to ask questions directly to senior leadership, something she said candidates consistently cite as meaningful, more than standard benefits like private healthcare, which tend to be assumed rather than celebrated.

Jack pointed to culture and community: employee resource groups spanning LGBTQ+ inclusion, family and parental leave support, and a Young Professionals Network he's run himself, alongside informal social groups like a lunchtime run club. One grad-led cross-functional project, proposing year-round "flexi Fridays," was pitched to UK leadership and has now been rolled out business-wide.

Eva highlighted a smaller but highly practical benefit: £500 toward driving lessons and tests, recognising that many United Utilities roles eventually require a licence and that the cost can be a genuine barrier for many young people starting out.

Measuring whether it's working

With the payoff from an early careers hire often years away, the panel described a mix of short and long-term measures of success. Jack pointed to performance in role after the first year as an early signal, and to the number of current senior and middle managers who themselves started on early careers programmes as longer-term proof that investment pays off. Eva highlighted retention as the clearest marker of success at United Utilities, where the CEO was himself a graduate hire, arguing that early careers pipelines only deliver value if people stay and grow within the business. Cara shared Anglian Water's 87% apprentice retention rate, built on continuously gathering feedback, including directly after induction weeks, to keep refining the programme.

Key takeaways

• CV and university-pedigree screening increasingly measures access to opportunity rather than genuine potential. Application questions, behavioural assessment and values alignment give a fairer, more accurate picture.
• Redesigning the whole selection journey, not just the entry criteria, matters. Informal site visits, realistic job-preview exercises, and moving away from highly coachable interview formats all reduce the advantage held by candidates with more support or prior polish.
• The strongest predictors of early careers application success often sit outside a traditional CV entirely: volunteering, part-time work, and personal projects like community fundraising or hands-on hobbies can reveal genuine motivation and transferable skills.
• Quality of attraction matters more than volume. Open evenings, targeted outreach, and authentic, candidate-created content consistently outperformed broader, more traditional recruitment marketing across all three organisations.
• What early careers candidates value most isn't primarily pay or perks, it's access, community and visible progression: exposure to senior leaders, employee networks, and practical benefits that remove genuine barriers to starting a career.
• Retention, not just recruitment, is the real measure of success. Programmes that are held accountable for how long people stay and how far they progress build far stronger long-term pipelines than those measured on hires alone.