Small and Personalized
Many companies recruit more new hires than they could ever place in executive ranks, to hedge high attrition rates and reserve the option of weeding out underachievers. W.W. Grainger Inc., a $4.7 billion equipment supplier, takes a different approach, keeping its Financial Development Program small and personalized.

"We don't sift through and decide who we want to keep after three or four years; we try to make those decisions up front," says Ron Jadin, vice president of finance for Grainger and a graduate of General Electric's Financial Management Program. "We want the demand for these folks to be much greater than the supply."

In that spirit, the Chicago-area company has devoted all of its recruiting energies to a single school, the University of Illinois, and specially trains its vice presidents in interviewing techniques before bringing top candidates into company headquarters. Job offers go out to the fortunate four or five students within a week of their interviews, and are nearly always accepted, according to Jadin

Once on board, new hires have their choice of 12 types of assignments (6 in corporate finance, 6 on business-unit finance staffs), with the possibility of "tweaking" an assignment to better fit the skills they need to learn. They also undergo post-assignment debriefings to assess their progress. "Because we're small, we can be a lot more flexible than a large program that has a lot of bureaucracy," says Jadin.

Is the training a success? So far all of the graduates have found jobs within Grainger after their two to three years of short-term assignments, Jadin says, although with only 11 FDP graduates and eight people still in the six-year-old program, the data is slim. He has high hopes, though, that the program will continue and perhaps even grow, as other departments within Grainger, such as marketing, start to hire graduates of the program. "As our business becomes more fact-based, there's more demand for finance skills across the company," says Jadin, "and the rotational program makes it easier to go cross-functional, since the graduates have already built relationships in other departments." —A.N.

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