This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
Kerry: As a graduate or someone early in their career, your job is to learn from others. Being open and comfortable with feedback is really important as well.
Intro#
James: Hello, and welcome to Graduate Theory. Today’s guest has worked in HR for over 18 years in professional services, banking, health, sports, and now tech. She’s a former nurse and professional athlete and passionate about developing people to be their best. Please welcome Kerry Callenbach.
Kerry: Hi, James. What an intro! I was wondering whether you were really talking about me.
James: It’s amazing what you’ve managed to achieve. You’ve had exposure to human resources across a wide number of domains and some really interesting experiences that I’m excited to chat about today.
Before the episode, you told me that you used to work at Deloitte, managing its graduate recruitment work across Australia. One year, you saw 20,000 applications for graduate positions. I’d love to dive into that story and hear what it involved.
Kerry having 20,000+ applications at Deloitte#
Kerry: What a great place to start. I worked at Deloitte for just under 10 years. I started in graduate recruitment, then reached a point where I was looking at it nationally for Deloitte Australia. It’s a big global consultancy.
It was a phenomenal place to get a really good grounding on graduate recruitment and the role graduates play in a work ecosystem, and also some of the richness that you can get from being in big places like that. But being in big places like that does mean it’s got a great brand and a great reputation.
Back then, you’d be out at university society events and we could all still meet in person. I think that’s starting to happen again now. You would meet a lot of people along the way. That particular year had a large intake: I think we were bringing in around 500 or 600 vacationers and graduates across Australia. That led to a large number of applications. The rules for international students had recently changed, which meant we could consider students with visas when we hadn’t been able to before.
We received just over 20,000 applications. We had really strict timelines: we’d open and close applications, screen them all by a certain date and try to finish within three or four days. Then we would start our recruitment process with group assessments. It took an entire team—12 of us—and we would call on experienced interviewers from the different service lines to help screen applications. Every application was reviewed and either accepted or rejected.
James: Wow.
Kerry: Right at the beginning of it.
How does the application process typically look?#
James: That’s pretty incredible. What does that look like? There are all these steps now when you’re applying, including automated testing and video interviews. Does everyone do those things, or how does narrowing people down work? When do people start getting the noes?
Kerry: Really good question. I think the digitalisation of recruitment has become far more prevalent in the last couple of years with the introduction of things like video interviewing. You complete the coding test before we’ll talk to you, all of those things. Really what they are ultimately is a screening tool. It’s a way to filter candidates out.
Every employer will look for something different, and the best way you can determine what they’re looking for is two things. When you jump on the website, most employers are pretty transparent about what makes a good candidate and what makes someone successful in their company. Have a look at things like values or principles as well, because attributes and capabilities will be intrinsically tied back through behaviours to values or principles. They’re really good starting places to understand what does good look like and what things they’re going to be screening for or filtering for in an application.
Ultimately they will be using it to determine whether they take you through to the next step. Your first point is always your resume or your CV. I say that’s like your invitation to come into someone’s house. You pop it in the postbox and that’s their determination: “Hey, I like what I see, I’d like to pursue this conversation.”
So the first thing I always say is make sure you’ve got a CV. Some people still ask for cover letters—I hope we might move on from that—but make sure they’re tied back to the success factors or the values or the principles. Are you referring to them in your cover letter? Have you highlighted them or where you may have demonstrated them prior at university, at your work, at your volunteer activities, at church, at sport? Make sure they are tied back into your application.
Once you’ve got through that, you’ll have different tests based on what the employer is looking for. Whether it’s a coding test, an interview or an inbox tray exercise, each one filters your application based on your ability to perform or demonstrate particular attributes.
For example, in a video interview, they’ll be looking for communication skills. How do you think on your feet? They might also ask specific behavioural questions. Assessing those attributes earlier shortens the time they would otherwise spend at a later stage. Does that help?
The process will depend on the employer, but each stage is ultimately a filtering or screening process for those attributes and capabilities, both technical and behavioural.
How many people actually get to the final interview stage from the initial application process?#
James: Roughly what percentage of people get past the video interview? I’m guessing there’s usually a group assessment or a more personal experience after that. How many people get to that stage?
Kerry: That was one of the most common questions I would get on campus. Here’s the reality: there is a number, and it will be determined by how many places they have in the program.
For example, if I take the 20,000—don’t quote me on these exactly, I can’t remember exactly how many they were—but we would take, I think, 500 grads that year. Out of 20,000 applications, we’d probably screen it down and then from there we would get a phone screen and we would probably narrow that down to maybe six or seven hundred. And then through there you’d get the filtering process.
Every stage is a cut-off, generally determined by the prior year. Your team will sit down and say, “Last year we took 10 graduates. We brought 20 people through the process because we had a 50% decline rate. Knowing that, next year we’ll have to bring at least 20 candidates through if we want 10 graduate acceptances.” It’s all based on decline rates from previous years.
James: That’s interesting. Some people are getting multiple offers and have to decline them. Often people are in the reverse situation, where they get a yes for the one offer they want. That’s definitely something to think about.
Kerry: That’s how big companies work. Smaller and medium-sized companies or startups can be very different. They’re much more concerned with, “Is this someone we can work with?” The technical side is important, don’t get me wrong. But when you’ve got a smaller team working closely with someone for eight or nine hours a day, you want to know you’ll get along with them.
My boss at Mantle Group, Caroline Hinshaw, has an airport test. Her airport test is: if you were stuck in an airport with that person for four hours, would you want to just get on the first plane home, or would you be like, “Cool, that’s okay, I feel really great about it”? When you’re getting into a small place, that airport test is super important.
So the bigger companies will use more sophisticated or advanced recruitment screening and filtering, and it can be brutal. I’ll be really honest. To get to the final point, it can come down to things such as attention to detail, grammar, spelling on applications.
I would always get applications where someone was applying to Deloitte but they’d have one of the other big four brand names on it—and that’s a red flag. We know you’re applying everywhere. I think you’d be pretty silly to think that people aren’t applying for multiple jobs, but ultimately if it came down to two candidates and both had performed exceptionally well through the process, you do have to go, “What’s going to be the tiebreaker?” Unfortunately it can come down to really minor things like spelling and grammar and attention to detail.
What steps can people take to improve their application?#
James: I’d love to continue that. What things can people do to have a better chance of getting to the end of these processes? Because there is a lot of automation and things like that now. How can people set themselves up through this process to have a better chance of getting to the end?
Kerry: I think that is such a good point. Throughout my time, and we’ve spoken about this as well, it’s why I’ve done things a little bit differently at Mantle Group. I think sometimes when you look at how many roles you need to recruit or bring through, we forget to humanise the process.
It’s brutal going through a recruitment. It’s not nice. You have to stand there and talk about yourself and put yourself up on a pedestal. That’s not easy for a lot of people to do. It’s not a natural thing. We’re not natural at talking about ourselves to others to say how amazing we are. It feels a bit funny.
I think a couple of things. My first one: get comfortable with your own elevator pitch. What is it? Why are you special? Think about how you would talk about yourself and what you’re really good at or what you’re passionate about. Practice your elevator pitch.
The best people you can do it to are, quite honestly, your mum, your dad, your partner, because they’ll give you the most brutal feedback. They’ve got nothing to lose. You’re still going to love them even if they say something harsh. So I think that would be my first point.
The second is to humanise the process where you can. Go to events, meet-ups and online seminars, and try to meet people from the company to get a feel for it. Every time we run a campaign, I’ll get messages from people in the business: “I just met this person” or “This person reached out to me on LinkedIn. I had a really good chat with them.”
So you do go, “OK, great. Jo has recommended James. So I’m going to have a look for James’s application now.” Referral is always a really good thing. Reach out, go chat with people from the company, go to those events, go to those meet-ups, and see if you can introduce yourself or get to chat with someone from the company.
I think the third one is tailor your application. Every company is different. Everyone is unique. So really make sure that you represent that in your application, that you’ve demonstrated you’ve done some research about the company, that there’s an alignment between what they do and what you want to do or where you want to work.
That’s really important. For example, a bigger corporate company will have traditional hierarchies and structures and processes and policies in place. If someone was to write about how policies and hierarchies are really important for them to advance their career and they applied to Mantle, it wouldn’t work because we don’t have any of those things. We don’t have any HR policies. We have no performance reviews. We have no hierarchy.
So you’ve got to tailor your application to represent that you’ve done some research, but also that it aligns to what you want to do. That’s really important because we will look for those things.
Those annoying stock-standard questions you have to put on an application get read, because they help us see that James is comfortable with a flat structure or that he’s self-motivated and won’t need KPIs in a performance review to guide him.
There are things that are really important. Ultimately at the end of the day, I give absolute kudos to anyone who reaches out to me directly and says, “Can I chat? I’ve got a question I want to ask.”
And look, I might not get back to you straight away. Follow up. Show your passion, show your desire. That would be my key tips: elevator pitch, go out and meet people, humanise the process for you and them, and then tailor your application to reflect that you’ve done your research and that it truly aligns with what you want to do and how you want to work.
Tailor Your Application#
James: I think that’s so important. Tailoring your application can really separate you from someone who sends the same resume to every company. I recently saw someone make a new resume using the colours of the company’s platform. It was a Spotify application with green in certain places and Spotify’s dark grey. I liked that. It would be a bonus because it shows that you care.
Kerry: Hundred percent. If you can stand out—and look, the challenge you’ve got is there are so many incredible resume templates on places like Canva and things. They’re all for free. Microsoft has amazing templates. But guess what? They’re also available to everyone else. So if you’re using that amazing template, I guarantee you other people are using that tool.
Do something really different. I’m thinking back to someone who applied for a role and sent their resume inside a box of chocolates. In each wrapper was an attribute they thought they had. You opened it up—no chocolates inside, dammit—but found statements such as, “I’m a good communicator.” We were hiring for a role in education, and the idea was that teachers always receive chocolates. Her application was, “Here’s my box of chocolates to you.”
I called her because I thought it was so clever. It was different and caught my attention. I wanted to learn more about her because the application was so creative. Was creativity important where I was working? Yes, it was. So let’s chat.
What Mistakes do Graduates make when applying for roles?#
James: What mistakes do people make during this process? Are there simple things that would make a big improvement if people fixed them? Does anything come to mind?
Kerry: That’s a good question. I’m reflecting back on what are some common mistakes or common things that I see. I think the big one would be not tailoring the application. Just wrong details, things like that. Take the time to do that.
I think the second one would be not being prepared to have that conversation. So if you put in a job application, expect to be called. I think you should just expect to be called. Sometimes people answer the phone and remember, that’s your first impression with your employer. It’s a horrible one, but it is. It’s your first impression to go, “This is me. Here’s my elevator pitch,” so to speak.
Be prepared to talk. A lot of the time, I would speak to people who couldn’t understand—they’re like, “Where have I applied for? What do you do again?” It’s not a great first impression to make. So always be prepared. Once you press send, be ready to do your elevator pitch.
And if you’re not ready, that’s okay too. Maybe you’re getting ready for finals, you’re studying, you’re in intense exam prep. Just say, “I’m so sorry, I can’t talk right now. Is there a time that I can call you?” That is totally okay to do. Don’t panic. But be ready. And if you’re not ready, be okay to say, “I’m not ready right now” or “I’m so sorry, I’m in the middle of something.”
I think that would be my biggest advice: it’s okay to say “not now.”
The other one would be, when you’re in the interview or group assessment, particularly group assessment: you’ve got to contribute. That was the number one thing that used to always get people screened out—that they wouldn’t contribute.
What we want to see in a group assessment is your input, insight and ideas. Whether they’re right or wrong doesn’t necessarily matter, because you aren’t being assessed on technical skills. It’s more about behaviour and teamwork. You’ve got to collaborate and contribute. That was the number one issue.
A tip on that one: if you had someone who was really dominant in your group—and that will also happen in life, when you’re coming into a team or you go to a client meeting, there’s always someone who’s a little bit more dominant or a little bit more vocal in putting forward—you deal with that. It might be saying, “Hey, look, that was a really great suggestion, James. Thanks for leading that discussion.” You can still contribute in ways. Think about things such as input, counteraction, or recognition in a group. All of those things are considered collaboration and contribution.
The final one is to be prepared for interviews. Practise. I can’t emphasise this enough. Sit down and practise interviewing, talking about yourself and drawing on examples from your life, work, university or sport to reflect what you’ve done and how you’ve developed particular skills or attributes.
Research the company as well. We still get people saying, “I don’t know what you do. I’m not sure exactly what the company does or what its different brands are.” You’ll get an invitation in your diary or advance notice of an interview. Be prepared to talk and show what you know about the company.
James: Certainly the preparation is great. And I think even with the resume, tailoring it to the company, it’s important to understand if you’re getting to that stage—what are the company’s values? You’ve got to show a little bit of interest.
Kerry: The thing I’m going to say is: I get so nervous in interviews. It’s a superficial environment, an interview. It’s like, “Please stand here for an hour and tell me how amazing you are.” We don’t do that every day. So nerves and feeling uncomfortable, I think, are all really normal feelings when you go into an interview.
But remember it’s also a two-way conversation. They’re there to say, “Hey, is this person someone I want to work with?” And ultimately it’s also an opportunity for you to determine, “Are these people I want to hang out with eight hours of my life every day?” It’s a two-way thing.
I think spend some time in non-interview chat. That’s really important—that walk to the interview room, or when you log on for a virtual interview. Be comfortable to have some of those icebreaker discussions, things like, “Hey, how’s it going? How’s your week been? What’s been keeping you busy? Have you got anything planned for the Easter weekend?”
All of those are relationship-building conversation starters. That’s important whether you work in consulting or at a product company. Being able to converse with others and build rapport and relationships is essential. Don’t underestimate the impact of small-talk conversation starters in an interview.
Traits of Successful Graduates#
James: Once a graduate has gone through this process and joined the company, what can they do to perform well and have a good experience? Are there particular traits you’ve seen in graduates who go on to thrive in that environment?
Kerry: That’s a really good question. My first tip—I literally last week had multiple conversations and I will have a few with our future hires, hopefully, who put up their hands—would be: be kind to yourself.
I think you put so much pressure on yourself to perform well and do really well, and you want to do really well. But being kind to yourself, don’t put too much pressure. It’s going to be a really hard slog when you first start in a job. People tend to go really fast because you want to make a good impression and you want to build a reputation. You want to show that you’re great. So you go really hard.
Things can’t keep going up on a trajectory like that. What happens if we keep going hard? You come down. Emotionally exhausted, physically exhausted. Our brain doesn’t work at the same level. So I think first up, be really kind to yourself.
People who do really well recognise that it’s a learning experience. They understand that they’re there to learn, and they’re curious and open to it. They don’t expect to be sent straight to a client or into the back end of a production environment on day one. They understand that observing for a while is an important part of the process.
Curiosity is the second one. Genuinely curious people ask, “Why do we do things like that? Is there a particular reason it happens this way?” A desire to understand is an important trait. It shows interest in others and helps build relationships and trust. Curious people tend to build relationships more quickly.
I’ve said curiosity, said kindness to yourself—very important. I think the other one is openness to feedback. An actual willingness to go, “How can I be better?” That growth mindset, really. If you’re thinking about it, it’s going, “I want some feedback to understand how am I going. What am I doing well? What could I be doing differently?”
That can be really tricky. I think when you’re a grad, you open yourself up to feel vulnerable. “What if I’m not doing a good job?” But as a graduate or someone early in their career, your job is to learn from others. I think being open and comfortable with feedback is also a really important one. That will most likely build your level of comfort and safety in going, “It’s okay if I don’t know everything.”
The final one, particularly in a bigger company, is understanding what the journey looks like. What does good look like? Many places have amazing career paths already mapped out. At the associate level, they set out the attributes and capabilities that make someone good.
Have a look at these, understand them, take some time to understand what does that mean. If it is showing a willingness to collaborate with others, spend some time to go, “Okay, what does that look like in real life? Does it mean I’m contributing in meetings? Does it mean that I offer to take the minutes?”
Ask your manager, a people guide or HR to help you understand those attributes. A startup or small-to-medium company might not have those processes or frameworks in place, so sit down with someone and ask, “What does good look like? Who’s excellent, and what makes them awesome at this company?” Understand what you could be doing or demonstrating. That knowledge helps you set expectations for yourself.
Those are probably my key points. The only other consideration is people who want to do everything. They want breadth without first developing depth.
That’s great—you can learn lots of different things—but as you progress throughout your career, at some point you’re going to have to be able to go deep in some topics. So be patient. You can absolutely learn lots of different things, but also recognise that going deeper in some particular topics or content or specialist areas is also really important as you progress throughout your career.
James: I totally agree. And I liked what you said there about a role model or someone that’s a few steps ahead—what are the things that they do well, and trying to model that. Because I think often it’s hard to find, well, it’s what you make in an organisation. The people that are doing well probably have slightly different traits that they have. You can’t just Google how to succeed at this company. It’s a bit more complicated.
So I think something like that, where you’re saying, “Hey, this is someone who I really aspire to be like” or someone that’s in the role that I’m aspiring to have—what are the things that they do? And really trying to improve those skills. I think that’s a great way of doing it.
Kerry: That’s right. Think about how you learn best as well.
We create individualised learning plans at Mantle Group for our graduates. One person—I won’t name them—wants to become more comfortable around clients. Within their learning plan, we’ve identified three people in their brand who excel at the client side, such as leading stand-ups. They’re going to shadow each person for a week because they’re an observational learner. They learn by watching and will then emulate it.
Doing that will bring far more richness to their learning and give them the opportunity to become good with clients, rather than making them read a book or take a course on great customer service.
I think being able to recognise where someone’s really good and go and shadow, or go and sit down and go, “How did you deal with that? Why is that important? Why did you do that with the client? Why did you talk to them that way? Why did you present it that way?” That will bring you absolute practical experience.
What would Kerry change about Graduate Programs?#
James: I think what you guys are doing with personal learning plans is really cool.
I’d love to ask as well, you’re someone that’s quite innovative in the HR space and trying to do things a bit differently. What are some things that you’d like to see change, or what direction would you like us to head in with this? Is there anything you’d like to see change with respect to grad programs?
Kerry: Oh, gosh, how much time have we got? For me, it starts with recognising that they’re adults. Sometimes we forget that. When students finish, they’ve probably been legal adults for three or four years; they turned 18 when they joined university.
But sometimes we forget and remove their autonomy or opportunity to behave like adults by labelling them as graduates and bringing them in as such. We take away their right to contribute to their own development.
I think it would be to take a moment and reflect on all the richness and diversity that people bring into a role. Studies is just one pathway into a career. Perhaps people have been working through it and they’ve developed and enhanced all these amazing skills. Perhaps they’re self-taught. The rise of online learning has contributed to a wealth of information that people have acquired by themselves, not through traditional educational pathways.
So I think it would be to recognise that they are adults and provide them the opportunity to contribute to that as well.
I think the second one would be, don’t just think about pigeonholing—think about opportunities. Is there an opportunity to expand out of that? You might’ve studied commerce at uni and majored in accounting. That doesn’t mean that you can only be an accountant. What are some of the skills that accountants bring? Things such as attention to detail, ability to problem solve. So look at the skills behind a course, rather than label the person to what they studied. I think that would be a really great one.
The US does something brilliantly: you don’t get recruited by your degree. You’ve studied something, and employers look at it differently. I wish we’d moved on from recruiting by degree, but we still tend to do it here in Australia.
The other change would be to focus on building human skills. I don’t like the term “soft skills”. Put much more emphasis on human skills, because they enable someone to be successful.
Throughout my career, when sitting at the table discussing promotions and salary reviews, I’ve never heard anyone say, “James studied at the University of Melbourne, so he should get promoted.” No one talks about that. Once you’re in a job, decisions are based on how you’re performing and whether you’re aligned with the way the company works, its culture and its attributes.
So let’s focus on building those human skills that we then look at throughout someone’s career. Really talk about them early in the career, enable them to be grown and harnessed early, and then support them later.
Kerry’s Advice for Graduates#
James: One question I ask every guest is: if you had to restart and go back to when you were first starting out, what would you do differently or tell yourself? Given your experience with so many graduates, you can take this in a different direction if you’d like.
Kerry: I so know this. And I know it because I’ve changed careers myself multiple times. It can feel really overwhelming when you start something. Our education system is designed to go: primary school, high school, university, job. And so if you don’t follow that pathway, you go, “I must’ve done something wrong” or “I haven’t succeeded to the point that I should have.”
I experienced that myself. I finished my sport, went into nursing and realised I didn’t want to do nursing. What should I do? You can have a bit of an identity crisis around that.
My advice would be: it is okay to not know what you want to do. It is totally okay. Your life is not over—your life is just beginning. You’re just at a fork in the road where you need to choose. So I would say be okay if you don’t know.
Also, if you go into a role or company and it doesn’t feel right—if you’re not being your best self—don’t stay. If you’re giving eight, nine or sometimes 10 hours of your life to a company, you want to enjoy being there. You want to say, “I’m really excited to get up for work today. I’m excited to spend time with my colleagues.”
And if you don’t feel like that, just take a moment to pause and say, “Why not? Where am I not feeling fulfilled? Is there something about the role? Is there something about the way that their culture works?” And if you don’t like it, don’t stay. It’s too many hours of your life to spend somewhere where you’re not getting fulfilled.
James: Totally. Especially when you’re young, that’s the time to take some risks, go out and find that thing that you really want to do. I think it’s so important that you don’t stay somewhere that you can’t see yourself for at least some length of time. If you can’t see yourself there, then it’s time to decide and take that leap and go do something else.
Kerry: Exactly. There’s an old adage—I’m not going to cite it correctly—about how you can have friends for a reason, a season or a lifetime. Maybe careers are the same. Sometimes you’ve got to do a job for a reason, perhaps because you need some money or you’ve just graduated and are going for whatever you can.
Maybe it’s seasonal: “I’m going to do this for three to five years to work out what my next step is or where I want to go next.”
Or maybe you’re fortunate enough to work it out early on. That’s your vocation: you’re passionate about it, and it’s what you want to do.
All of those things are okay. That’s important to know. If things aren’t as you want them to be right now, or they feel hard, that’s okay. Focus on what you love, talk to people, build your networks and start moving towards a place where you’re happy and can be your best self.
Contact Kerry#
James: Thanks so much for chatting today, Kerry. It’s been really interesting to hear your experiences and about this whole grad process. Thanks so much for your time today. If people want to find out more about yourself, if they want to connect with you further, where’s the best place for them to do that?
Kerry: I’d love to. But first I want to say thank you so much for inviting me on, James. I’ve really loved our chat. If people want to chat, they are so welcome to send me a message on LinkedIn, or they can send an email to me at Mantle Group. It’s just [email protected].
James: Fantastic. I’ll leave your details in the show notes, wherever people are watching, so they can find out more about yourself. But thanks so much for coming on today, Kerry, and all the best with everything that’s going on at Mantle Group. It’s really exciting what you’re doing, and I hope that this year and things continue to go well.
Kerry: Thanks so much, James. Appreciate it again.
Outro#
James: Thanks for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want to get my takeaways, the things that I learned from this episode, please go to GraduateTheory.com/subscribe, where you can get my takeaways and all the information about each episode, straight to your inbox.
Thanks so much for listening again today, and I’m looking forward to seeing you next week.