Our People

Talent, recruitment and retention

Recruitment, retention and development of talented people continues to be one of the highest priorities for our leaders. Top performers are attracted to the Group because of our strong brand and values; together with top class development and career opportunities.

Developing our current colleagues and succession planning are vital in supporting our growth strategy. In Autumn 2008, an Organisational Capability Review was completed. As a result, we have strong succession and development plans for all our senior leaders across the Group and have collected qualitative data on our top 300 colleagues. We are retaining people for an average tenure across our business of 13 years.

We run a wide range of generalist and specialist development programmes to support career progression into management. In 2008, we recruited 125 people into our graduate trainee programme, offered 44 internships and 110 student placements. Following the launch of the new Graduate Programme for 2009, our focus is now on attracting top talent into the organisation who will become senior business leaders of the future. We have also introduced a ‘customer facing’ element to the main programme so that all our graduates gain core banking ‘front-line’ experience. We are consistently identified in The Times Top 100 organisations for graduate recruitment. We also ran numerous programmes across our more senior populations to develop our pipeline of leaders for the future.

We actively track and manage retention of our highest performers, retaining 96.7 per cent of top performers in 2008 (up from 96 per cent in 2007).