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Roundtable · By invitation since 2023
Eighteen practitioners. Ninety minutes. Chatham House rules.
A small, invitation-only forum for UK heads of early careers, TA directors and talent programme leads. We’ve hosted twelve sessions in three years, with 200+ practitioners across seven sectors. Real operational problems, real peers, no panels and no vendor pitch. Conversations almost always continue afterwards in the cohort Slack channels.
The Roundtable, in numbers
Three years. Twelve sessions. 200+ practitioners.
We started the Roundtable in 2023 because the early-careers practitioner community didn’t have an obvious place to talk shop without a vendor in the room. Three years on, the format has barely changed — eighteen seats per session, no slides, no recording. The community has grown around it.
Where a session has produced an article, the link is on the card. Names of attendees aren’t published; the framing question, headline themes and the disagreements usually are.
Sessions hosted
12
Since the first session in March 2023.
Practitioners attended
200+
Across all twelve sessions; ~30% return for at least one more.
Sectors represented
7/7
Every sector we serve has been around the table at least three times.
Articles published
14
Anonymised takeaways, written up and published with participant sign-off.
What it is
A working session, not a webinar.
Each Roundtable runs for 90 minutes, online or hybrid, with up to 18 invited practitioners. The format is deliberately spare. One topic, agreed in advance with the participants. One framing question. Chatham House rules — you can use what you hear, you can’t attribute it.
It’s the room you’d convene yourself, if you had the time and the contacts.
We don’t pitch. We don’t demo. There are no slides, and the only TTP person in the room is usually David Allison, who chairs. Everyone else is in-house. The conversations have a habit of carrying on afterwards in dedicated Slack channels — that’s how the community has grown.
Selected anonymised takeaways are published as articles after each session, with participant approval and full redaction of anything sensitive. Look under Articles for the most recent.
Upcoming · Apply for an invite
Four scheduled sessions.
Each session is capped at 18 participants and filled by invitation; the “register interest” route routes to our community team for qualification. We aim to keep the room representative across sectors, organisation size and tenure.
If you’ve been invited, you’ll have a personal link. If you haven’t and you’d like to be considered, request an invite below — we’ll come back to you within a week with a sense of which session is the best fit.
How it works
From request to room, in four steps.
We deliberately keep it small and focused. The process below is what we ask everyone to follow — including ourselves on years two and three of returning members.
Brief introduction call
A 20-minute call with David or someone from the community team. Mostly so we can match you to the right session, partly so the room is representative.
Calendar invite + brief
If we’ve got a fit, you get an .ics calendar invite, the framing question, and a one-page brief from David two working days ahead. Nothing more.
The 90 minutes — and after
The session itself. Followed by an optional dedicated Slack channel for the cohort, where the conversation usually keeps going for weeks.
Who comes
Heads of early careers, TA directors, programme leads.
Everyone in the room has direct operational responsibility for an early-careers programme — whether that’s a 60-hire grad scheme at a FTSE 100, a 600-hire apprentice routeway in engineering, or a sub-50-cohort programme inside a public-sector body.
We ask people not to send their VP for them. The conversations work because the people in the room are the ones doing the work. Vendors, consultants and agencies aren’t in the room (with one obvious exception, who chairs).
If you’d come back next time, you’re the right person for the room.
Past sessions have included practitioners from Microsoft, Channel 4, John Lewis, Schneider Electric, PwC, TfL, NHS England, the Crown Office and a number of Russell Group universities, as well as smaller specialist employers and growth-stage businesses.
Archive
Three years of past sessions.
Every session we’ve hosted, with the framing question, sectors represented, attendee count, and a link to the published writeup where one exists. The room is always anonymous; the takeaways are not.
2026
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Mar 2026Session 12
Managing candidate overload.
Framing: “What does fair rejection look like at scale, and who carries the emotional load?”
Read writeup 7 min read
2025 — four sessions
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Dec 2025Session 11
Onboarding is the new differentiator.
Framing: “Why is the first 90 days predicting 24-month retention more reliably than salary, brand or line manager?”
Read writeup 11 min read -
Sep 2025Session 10
Inside the apprenticeship levy, year seven.
Framing: “What should the 2026 levy review actually change — and what should it leave alone?” Joint with the ISE; informed our HMT/IfATE working paper.
Read writeup 10 min read -
Jul 2025Session 09
The AI-on-both-sides problem.
Framing: “Candidates use AI to write applications; employers use AI to screen them. What does that do to signal quality, and what should we do differently?”
Read writeup Working paper, 18pp -
Mar 2025Session 08
Schools engagement: value over volume.
Framing: “How do we measure real impact when traditional engagement metrics flatter, and what replaces them?” Co-led with the schools team.
Read writeup Research, 14pp
2024 — four sessions
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Dec 2024Session 07
Adverse impact, in practice.
Framing: “Where does the 4-fifths rule actually break in production cohorts, and what corrective levers are realistic?”
Read methodology Methodology, 14pp -
Sep 2024Session 06
The first year of the Assessment Platform.
Framing: “After 12 months in production, what’s working, what isn’t, and what should the validity panel insist on next?” First year of TalentAssess in production cohorts.
Read benchmark Benchmark, 22pp -
May 2024Session 05
Predictive validity: what counts as evidence.
Framing: “If a vendor claims r = 0.4 against performance, what should you actually ask to see?” Methodology session for senior practitioners and procurement leads.
Read standard Methodology, 12pp -
Jan 2024Session 04
Public sector early careers forum.
Framing: “G-Cloud, Social Value Act, civil-service success profiles — how do these stack into a coherent early-careers strategy?” Joint with Crown Commercial Service.
Closed session No public writeup
2023 — the first three sessions
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Nov 2023Session 03
The volume problem.
Framing: “A graduate vacancy now gets 140 CVs. Is the answer better filtering, or a different funnel altogether?” The session where the ‘evidence-before-application’ framing first found agreement around the table.
Read paper Position paper, 22pp -
Jul 2023Session 02
Immersive Work Experience, at scale.
Framing: “Channel 4 and DHL ran the first IWX cohorts in 2022. What did the data say about engagement, completion and downstream applications?”
DHL case study Case study -
Mar 2023Session 01
The first roundtable.
Framing: “What do early-careers practitioners need that the trade bodies and conferences don’t already provide?” The founding session. The format we still use was sketched on a whiteboard during the first half of this 90 minutes.
Founding session No public writeup
The community after the room
The conversation usually keeps going.
The Roundtable doesn’t end at minute ninety. Each cohort gets a dedicated, optional Slack channel that runs for as long as the participants want to keep using it. Some are quiet after a fortnight; some are still active two years on.
A few of those Slacks are now where some of the most useful early-careers conversations in the UK actually happen.
Across all twelve session cohorts, around 130 practitioners are still in active channels — sharing job-spec drafts, asking for sense-checks on adverse-impact reports, swapping vendor due-diligence notes, and (occasionally) recruiting each other into new roles.
The community is closed by design. Slack invitations only go to attendees of a session and are non-transferable. We don’t monitor the channels, we don’t pitch in them, and we don’t publish what gets said.