Undiscovered talent is talent gone to waste. Youth in Pakistan has a reservoir of talent but with fewer avenues to showcase their abilities. Economists agree that the country has a sizeable demographic dividend in the shape of the young population with 60 percent of the people under 30 years of age. Pakistani businesses face the challenge of finding and retaining top-shelf talent. However, a lot of the available talent needs to build certain attributes to succeed in the corporate world.
According to a majority of employers in Pakistan, only two out of 10 correspondences with job seekers actually convert into hiring. It is no longer enough to place job advertisements. Hiring employees is a big investment and a tough job for any organisation. In this backdrop, efforts by Unilever Pakistan to identify management and marketing talent offer a great opportunity for the youth to find avenues to make the most of their abilities.
Unilever Pakistan launched "Unilever Talent Hunt - UTH" in 2014 as a means of providing an avenue for the country's top talent to showcase their abilities. The competition was built on the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) platform, both creating awareness and providing students with a chance to contribute to the USLP.
Participating students get to learn about the sustainability agenda of top Unilever brands, with the ambition of providing students the opportunity to showcase their academic and strategic acumen while building a stronger affiliation with some of the best educational institutes in the country.
The Unilever Talent Hunt is also aimed at building a stronger employer brand for the organisation amongst the best universities of the country. Through UTH, students get local and international exposure with the opportunity to learn from the best minds in the world. Students are exposed to real life business situations and challenges and they get a chance to harness their skills towards becoming future leaders.
In 2015, UTH reached out to a total of 5,500 students from diverse academic backgrounds. The Unilever Talent Hunt also provides the winners the opportunity to represent Pakistan at the Future Leader's League (FLL) held in London each year. The FLL is the finale of a global competition bringing students together from across the world to experience the nuances of future leadership. Providing such opportunities to raw talent would not only bring definite professional growth for young minds, but would also gear up positive competition among individuals and institutions as well at the domestic level.
The Unilever Talent Hunt (UTH) provides the proof that businesses in Pakistan must work to identify and nurture young talent for the increasingly interconnected global markets. Programs like UTH can play a pivotal role, especially in the developing world by creating space for young graduates. To avail maximum exposure and benefits of these programs our business teaching institutions and other multi-nationals should also come forward to encourage students to participate in such events to get a head start to their careers.-PR
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