Completely rethinking their view of what a desired recruit looks like has enabled Fujitsu to take on loyal, passionate apprentices that “blew the company’s socks off”, according to Michael Keegan the ICT company’s chairman.

Speaking on a panel at an event organised by everywoman, an organisation dedicated to the advancement of women in business at banking giant Barclay’s Canary Wharf home yesterday, Keegan spoke about how the firm’s traditional graduate recruitment methods had always delivered a certain type of apprentice.

Consequently, working with charity The Prince’s Trust, the firm learned to turn those methods on its head through a pilot known as the Get Into Programme. Along with two other companies, the aim was to find roles for 20 individuals with challenges, such as having a parent with addiction problems or poor school attendance due to the circumstances they found themselves in, Keegan explained.

“This is actually saying, forget everything you ever learned about hiring somebody, about what to look for,” Keegan said. “Go and look at people who have been completely excluded from the traditional hiring methodology that don’t tick any of the boxes.

“Working with this charity, we ran a programme to look at 20 or so young people from really excluded backgrounds and what we found was, over a two-week period, that they blew our socks off.

“Our HR department, having started off saying ‘Michael, what have you got us into?’, by the end of it they said: ‘You know we said we’ll try and find two people to hire? Well, we’ve seen these 20 people and we’ll hire six’.”

A year on, Keegan revealed all of the six are still with company.

Also speaking at the event, Wendy Papworth, Barclay’s diversity and inclusion director, revealed four out of six people it took on its pilot Return to Work programme in the UK were offered roles. The programme reaches out to men and women that have been out of work for a while and brings them into the organisation at vice president and director level.

Keeping to the theme of returnees to the workplace, Sheridan Ash, technology and investments director at professional services firm PwC, told delegates that to ensure women remain engaged when they go on maternity leave, they are assigned a sponsor to help them break down barriers with their career progression. While they are on maternity leave they are kept up to date with what’s happening with the business and kept motivated while they are away.

Ash added the firm also ensures that if a woman was going to be promoted before maternity leave she will be still be promoted and start in that position when she returns to work.

At the event, everywoman also revealed a white paper that revealed 36% of British businesses have no women in senior management roles at an estimated cost of £23bn to the UK economy.

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