Gateley, Olswang and Parabis are the latest firms to announce their NQ retention figures, at 47%, 62.5% and 66% respectively. Ouch.

Gateley kept on eight of its 17 qualifiers, down on the nine out of 12 last year (75%) but at least up on the five out of 16 (31%) in 2012. A spokesman said "we had more NQ vacancies available than we had trainees qualifying, but unfortunately in some cases vacancies did not match the locations or department that some of our qualifiers ideally wanted". Hmm. The firm has been unable to retain more than half its qualifiers despite offering jobs to all of them - what were those jobs, scrubbing the lavatories?

    An NQ position at Gateley yesterday
 
Olswang kept on five of its eight qualifiers. That's a pretty poor show compared with the eight out of eight it managed in March, and insiders have grumbled that none of the female trainees was retained. Still, it's up on previous years. And given that the firm cancelled its 2013 trainee intake and is taking on some of its future trainees via temping agency Accutrainee, things should improve in the future. A spokeswoman for the firm said "we have all measures in place to improve our retention rates and we are confident that our ability to retain talent will improve in the long term.We are excited about our pilot partnership with Accutrainee and delighted to welcome a recruit through that channel this September. However this pilot scheme does not signal a wider departure from our current trainee recruitment process or the assessment framework that we use."

Finally Parabis, winner of this year's Golden Turd, retained a shabby 12 of its 18 qualifiers. A spokeswoman wouldn't comment on the reasons for this pisspoor rate.
 
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Comments

Anonymous 19 September 14 14:27

Not surprising. Gateley is a great firm and the NQs will be very well trained. Their salaries are not competitive enough though so NQs will be attracted to bigger firms, who will gladly welcome them.

Anonymous 19 September 14 16:54

The usual HR guff from Olswang. Only male trainees retained is a concern really, isn't it...

Anonymous 19 September 14 17:00

I don't really understand why firms get panned for making sensible decisions not to over-offer if trainees are unsuitable or depts oversubscribed...