The Museum Victoria website tells us insects that undergo a full metamorphosis are called “holometabolous”. They have four distinct phases to their lifecycle: egg, larva, pupa and adult.
“The larva looks dramatically different to the adult insect, and must go through a pupal stage before it develops into an adult,” the museum website states.
Complete metamorphosis gives insects a survival advantage, the MV website explains. Holometabolous insects are not unlike financial planning graduates, who also go through four distinct phases before they emerge, butterfly-like, as fully functioning financial planners, a new report states.
The financial planning graduate lifecycle – resourcing, induction, development and retention – ensures that the graduate emerges stronger, fitter for purpose and much more likely to survive in the financial planning industry.
This lifecycle is described in a report, The Perfect Marriage – the Graduate and the Firm, which sounds like the title of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale but is published by Grad Mentor, a firm that specialises in identifying top graduate talent and matching it with employers.
Required reading
In 2016, Grad Mentor successfully placed about 60 graduates in financial planning practices across the country and the firm’s principal and founder, Alisdair Barr, wants to hit triple figures in 2017. A critical part of a successful placement is ensuring the employer knows what it’s in for and can create an environment where the graduate can grow and develop.
The Perfect Marriage should be required reading for all financial planning business owners. Before we know it, it will be January 1, 2019, and every single new entrant to financial planning after that will have to be a graduate. If you harbour any growth ambitions for your business but you don’t know how to attract and retain this kind of talent, you’re stuffed.
As Professional Planner reported this week, the commercial interests of financial planning firms hiring graduates should sit comfortably alongside whatever obligations those firms are required to fulfil in structuring the proposed professional year (PY) for graduate hires.
Some of The Perfect Marriage is common sense. For example, it states that it’s a good idea if the values of the employer and the graduate more or less line up. But some of it is not quite as intuitive. Employers cling to myths about Generation Y graduates being feckless, indolent and almost constantly glued to the screens of various hand-held devices. Graduates cling to myths about employers being exploitative, interested only in profit and not necessarily aligned on values and ethics. The Grad Mentor report explodes all of those myths, and more.
Resourcing, not recruiting
Just as importantly, it explains exactly what the four phases of the graduate’s lifecycle mean for both graduate and employer, and how to traverse them.
First things first. The report explains there’s a big difference between “recruiting” a graduate and “resourcing” for one.
“When we talk about resourcing, we mean strategic planning and working through a process to have the effective selection and placement of talent in a growing business over time,” it states. “Recruitment is an activity that tends to be more of a tactical solution to an immediate situation. Examples of [such a situation] are a staff member leaving the firm or an urgent need for increased capacity.
“When it comes to graduates, a resourcing approach is more suitable and effective than a recruitment approach, as it considers the strategic planning and longer-term business issues and we can plan for when the talent becomes available through their penultimate and final years of tertiary education.”
It should not take more than about 18 months to two years to get a graduate through the early stages of the lifecycle and into the development stage, where they can become a revenue- and profit-generating member of staff. The timeframes set out in the Grad Mentor report are supported anecdotally by a range of planning businesses, including at least one of the major banks, which states 18 months is about average and that it would start to ask questions about the individual’s suitability for the career they’ve chosen if they were not properly up and running within 24 months.
It’s a financial commitment to hire someone and develop them through the initial stages of a career – to facilitate their metamorphosis from egg to adult. But it’s more than that, and it has benefits beyond the medium- and long-term commercial interests of the employer. It’s a professional commitment. It’s a commitment to giving something back, and to making sure that the future of the profession remains in good hands.
