One on One with Protiviti's Scott Redfearn

Campus recruiting was highly competitive—and costly. MBA starting salaries set records across many firms. In the next few months you'll be onboarding the Class of 2011. Now what? The first step is usually an intensive training program, preparing new hires for life as consultants inside your firm. Protiviti recently reinvented their training program and the results have been remarkable. To learn more, Consulting One on One sat down with Protiviti's VP of HR Scott Redfearn.

Consulting: Why did you feel a change was necessary?

Redfearn: For campus hires, it was clear to us that we had to rethink our training program to better engage with the changing workforce. We had to change to meet the needs of Generation Y. We believe that our approach to teaching has to capitalize on who they are. At the risk of over-generalizing, Generation Y is comprised of people who are less interested in training and more interested in learning. They fully embrace new technologies, including social media. They are socially oriented, time-sensitive and direct their attention to what engages them. It's not that their attention span is lower, but they are more impatient than previous generations—they've grown up with a large number of options at their disposal. We've seen these changes emerge in the DNA of our new hires and realized that our old way of training did not sufficiently engage them. Our old approach was Death by PowerPoint. It was very much lecture-based and instructor led and we found that the people were not emerging from our training any more prepared than they were when they went into training.