“What we’re now realising is, although we’ve got this amazing culture internally, we don’t tend to shout about it, like Google do for example, so no one else knows that. How do we still remain the humble brand that we try to be, but also shout about some of the amazing stuff that we do? That’s what millennials are interested in.”

“We have a big challenge where, to a degree, we have a very receptive audience type that will come to us for certain roles which we don’t struggle to fill. If anything, it’s more about how we get to the best of those people. But then there are entire other areas, particularly in digital and technology-focused roles, where, historically, the firm has not been associated with those kinds of roles. How do we go up against a Google, or a Facebook, and say, actually, we are the place to build your digital career or your technology career?”

“Our challenge is how to be braver about how we describe the work we do and who we work for and the kind of impact we have. That’s what people really want to hear more of.”

“We have a few hundred people that work until two in the morning in a call centre; it’s probably our biggest team of people. How do you make them passionate and spirited and mischievous when they’re there to do a job rather than a career?”

“We have people who have been with us twenty, thirty or forty years, and they’re all waiting to retire. We’ve got a lot of disengaged people in our branches who don’t like the way their jobs have changed over the years and they’re just waiting to go. That’s a big problem for us.”

“It has changed in some respects but we still have a massive skills shortage. We’re not producing enough graduates with any of the STEM subjects, so there are not enough people coming through and there are nowhere near enough women in the sectors I work in.”

“We’re adapting to the new graduate market, knowing that they probably will be gone within two or three years and trying to get value while they’re with us in the short term. We hope that they will come back. We accept that people are going to leave but we want them to go off, spread the brand and then come back.”

“We’re starting to look at school-leavers, as opposed to graduate level, because we think there’s more loyalty in that group.”

“There’ll always be a decent percentage that want to move on and branch out and that’s fine because they might circle-back, or, god-willing, take a position at a soon-to-be client. That would obviously be a win for us as well.”

“In three years our graduates have three rotations, so we keep them really busy and challenged and we give them really stretched targets. After three rotations they can decide which path they like. We found that a lot of graduates at the point of entering a job wouldn’t know what they wanted to do. They might be coming out of a certain discipline but then decide they want to do something totally different. With us they get a chance to try different roles in one company and that’s why our attrition rate is really low among graduates.”

“We tend to recruit from Russell Group universities and those students have had three years of all the employers on campus courting them and telling them how important they are because they’re trying to bring them in. I don’t think we necessarily do ourselves any favours by possibly over-promising the impact that we can offer graduates from day one.”