Based on Session 1 of The Human Factor Webinar Series, Beyond the CV, with Angela de Longchamps. Watch the full replay.
Most organisations already know their early career hires arrive qualified but not quite ready. The CV tells you what someone knows. It tells you nothing about whether they can walk into a meeting, take feedback, or carry themselves like they belong there.
The usual responses are to filter people out rather than build them up, or to put them through another classroom, just one housed inside the workplace. Neither works, because the gap between qualified and effective isn’t a graduate problem. It’s a development problem. And development problems can be solved.
In Beyond the CV, Angela de Longchamps closed with three things leaders can start on. Not grand transformation programmes, just practical shifts to try on a Monday morning.
1. Build the first six months deliberately
Every workplace runs on rules nobody writes down. How to read a room before you speak. When it’s appropriate to disagree with your manager. How to ask for help without looking as if you can’t do the job.
Some young people absorb these rules growing up, because they were modelled at home or at school. Many don’t. They arrive from a family, an institution or a campus that never exposed them to the way a professional environment actually works, and they are expected to work it out alone.
Don’t leave this invisible curriculum to chance. The first step is to stop assuming people know it. Angela’s phrase for it is to make the implicit explicit: teach the unwritten rules as deliberately and consistently as you would teach a technical process.
An HR partner at a leading investment bank described the alternative well. His new joiners have very different experiences depending on which manager they happen to be assigned to, and bad habits are both taught and caught. Whatever you don’t make explicit, people will still learn. They’ll simply learn it from whoever is nearest.
In practice, that means getting specific about the behaviours you want to be part of your culture. Which habits do people currently pick up by accident? Which of those do you want to turn into clear, stated expectations? Answering that properly may take more than one person with a sheet of paper. It might need a workshop, or input from the people who live those behaviours every day.
2. Separate intent from impact
Early career employees often experience feedback as punishment. That isn’t fragility. It’s what their previous environment trained them to expect.
Academia runs on verdicts. You submit the work, you receive a mark, and you move on. Angela described one of her own graduates at Inspired Leadership, a strong academic used to marks in the 80s, for whom evaluation had always been a single, final judgment, and usually a very positive one.
The workplace works differently. Work is produced, shared, improved and shared again. Feedback isn’t a verdict on the person; it’s part of how the work gets better. For someone who has only known the verdict model, though, every round of feedback can feel like failing.
Closing that gap means walking new hires through the difference between what they meant and how it actually landed. Once feedback is understood as part of the working process, rather than a quarterly evaluation, it stops being something to brace against and becomes something to use. Angela noted that the same graduate, seven or eight months into the Human Factor journey, had been transformed by exactly this shift, in ways that reached well beyond the office.
3. Equip the managers, not just the new hires
The third shift is the one most organisations skip. No amount of graduate training will close the gap on its own, because half of it sits on the other side of the relationship.
Many early career hires report to newly promoted first line managers who have never been taught how to have a hard conversation or give developmental feedback. Even experienced managers often lack the tools to bridge the distance between their own years in the workplace and someone’s very first job. Managers need to learn how to give feedback that develops people, and how to make the implicit explicit for their teams.
The thinking behind the three shifts
These three tactics mirror the three pillars of the Human Factor approach and the wider Inspired Leadership philosophy:
- Digitally enabled, so the unwritten rules reach everyone consistently, not just the people who happened to get a good manager.
- Genuinely human, because judgment, confidence, ownership and accountability are built through real relationships with skilled facilitators.
- Systemic, developing the manager and the mentor alongside the graduate.
Underneath all three is a simple belief: better leaders make better people, at every level of the organisation.
Start teaching the map
The gap between qualified and effective is real, but it’s solvable. The change starts when organisations stop screening for the people who already happen to have the map, and start teaching the map itself.
If one of these three shifts stood out, start there on Monday.
How ready is your organisation? Take the Early Career Readiness Check: https://early-careerreadinesscheck.scoreapp.com
