Recruiting a young person through Create Jobs

10 July 2014

Last Summer Discover Children’s Story Centre worked with Create Jobs to recruit a paid internship for their Development department. Discover is London’s only children’s museum offering a wonderfully immersive experience focused around stories and storytelling. Discover consists of magical environments created by artists, where children, their families and teachers can build their own stories as they travel through different interactive exhibitions.

Sponsorship, donations and grants are vital to building on their innovative and high quality programme and development team looked at their resources and identified where they could use the support of a new staff member.

Clare Haskins, Head of Development, got in touch with A New Direction and the Create Jobs team, she decided to recruit the role through Create Jobs because of the emphasis on recruiting from Local Boroughs and Clare recognised that this offered a useful perspective for the team.

In October 2013 Create Jobs visited the Waltham Forest Youth Hub JCP. The team have good links with this youth-centred Job centre and hold regular sessions presenting opportunities to groups of young people looking for interesting creative work. Scarlett Cook attended one of these sessions and felt encouraged to apply for the role.

Scarlett grew up in Waltham Forest, she benefit from access to the arts as a child and had an ambition to use her skills to widen access to local arts services for other children and young people growing up in the area. She articulated this in her application and interview, as well as describing her experience gained during her university studies. What she was really hoping to achieve was an entry into the charity and arts sector that this opportunity provided.

Clare reflected that, "It is tempting to assume that having someone who is young and therefore does not have experience will require support and resources that are in short supply in our sector".

This assumption was happily proven not to be the case:

"Scarlett was an absolute asset to Discover Children's Story Centre during her 6 months with us and the process of developing the role was strategically helpful in identifying areas where we needed to increase our capacity."

"We successfully recruited an outstanding candidate who I don't think we would have found through advertising the post ourselves."

(Scarlett at her work experience at Discover)

As Head of Development, Clare Haskins has a critical role in the future sustainability of the organisation and by recruiting Scarlett she was able to build on this work, she reported that;

"Having an intern had a direct impact on our income and Scarlett was personally responsible for raising £25,000 from trusts and foundations for educational work at Discover. Also working with an Intern meant that the Head of Development benefitted from a new perspective on the work we do and the process of communicating fundraising plans and strategy was very useful in shaping future direction".

Not only did Discover gain a great deal form the Scarlett’s hard work but Clare was able to observe how Scarlet developed in the role;

"I hope that Scarlett gained useful experience and insight into development and fundraising during her time at Discover. She clearly had all the skills and intelligence to make a great fundraiser and we were lucky that she chose to do her Internship at Discover."

"Our experience of the Create Jobs programme is entirely positive - we gained a huge amount from it both in terms of a hugely valuable addition to our team and the process itself. I have, and will continue to, recommend it to other creative and cultural employers."

We’re really pleased to hear Discover enthusiastically advocate for the experience of recruiting through Create Jobs and hope to see this example repeated across London’s thriving Creative and Cultural sectors.

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