The RAW Talent scheme started 10 years ago, with a focus on helping people who have left prison back into work. It has now expanded to include people dealing with addiction, homelessness, mental ill-health or neurodivergence, and has so far supported at least 230 people – 5% of Cook's total workforce.
“At Cook, we've always had this feeling in our belly that doing good business is about doing more than simply turning a profit for shareholders,” said Annie Gale, talent manager of the RAW Talent programme, speaking to HR magazine. “We want to improve the way society is, and the way that the planet is.
“Having a job dramatically reduces the chance of someone reoffending,” Gale continued. “That means fewer victims of crime where we’re working, and fewer families impacted by that. It also means that the individual is contributing to society – they’ve got a job, they’ve got purposeful activity in their life – which impacts their families and future generations and their communities.”
Read more: Hiring ex-offenders: new guidance published by CIPD Trust
Cook partners with prisons, probation charities and job centres to identify talent that needs support, Gale explained. “A partner organisation will refer a person to us, and then we’ll meet them and see whether we think we can offer appropriate support, and whether they can or would like to work,” she explained.
Once someone has been referred to the programme, the RAW Talent team will meet with them and try to figure out their hopes and dreams.
Gale described: “During that chat, we’re trying to establish what support needs that person has, and whether we can support them properly, whether they can work and want to work, and whether that work will not increase their risk, either to themselves or to the product, brand, or people around them.”
The team also conducts a risk assessment for people with a conviction for a violent crime. Those that make it through the first stage of the recruitment process are invited to a ‘Get Ready’ training programme, run by the Shaw Trust charity, which supports, co-create and delivers employability programmes.
Across the six days, candidates are taught about the “essential ingredients” to working at Cook, such as their culture and core values. This stage is crucial, Gale explained, to helping those who have been out of work transition into the workplace.
She said: “For a lot of people, it’s not fair to assume that they know how to go about being in a workplace because they haven’t had it modelled, or they haven’t grown up in a place where there have been those kinds of values.”
Cook's RAW Talent recruits are also trained in soft skills, such as confidence and resilience, and how to interact with people they disagree with. They are also given four trial shifts in the kitchen or logistics office, and interview prep. Feedback is offered at each stage, and anyone that completes the training is guaranteed an interview.
Of the 15 candidates in each training cohort, eight to 10 roles are offered. “Once they start, we make sure to put them in a well-established team with a strong leader,” Gale explained. This is a lesson that the Cook team learned from Pret A Manger, which prevents new starters becoming unsettled.
“The first two to six weeks can be difficult for people, especially if they’ve not worked before or it’s been a long time.”
To help them settle in, each candidate is given a buddy, who is someone who has been through the programme. “We use a coaching approach in the buddy sessions to help people,” Gale described. “It’s literally just asking questions to help them put small steps in place towards those goals. Then we buddy them through their engagement periods.”
It’s not just managers and RAW Talent alumni who are involved in the effort. “Almost everyone at Cook is involved in some way to support,” said Gale. But the people, kitchen and logistics, recruitment and learning and development teams work most closely with the programme.
They exchange tips on how to train people, and meet with the managers, who work with the RAW Talent participants once a fortnight to check that both the manager and programme member are getting the right support.
Read more: Disclosure barrier to employment lifted for thousands of ex-offenders
“I won’t say we get it right every time,” Gale added. Over 10 years of running the programme, the team has learned to assess whether they can adequately support a candidate.
“We learned quite early that we need to be careful not to be drawn into a numbers game, because this is people’s lives we’re dealing with, and we can potentially do more harm than good by taking someone on who’s not ready for work.”
Just like any employee, RAW Talent candidates can have something happen outside of work that sets them back. “Some people need a little bit more support to achieve what they’re here for,” Gale explained.
Cook’s partners support participants with finding somewhere to live, accessing healthcare or anything else they might need outside of work. The company also consults with other employers, such as Pret A Manger, Timpson’s and Greggs through the Employers’ Forum for Reducing Reoffending, to exchange tips on how to best support people back into work.
This approach to finding the right balance for support has also helped nourish a culture of care in Cook’s wider workforce, too. “We have a really strong culture of care and looking out for one another, which is not necessarily a RAW-talent-specific thing, but RAW Talent has made us better at it,” Gale reflected.
“If we can support someone who's got barriers brilliantly, then we can support everyone brilliantly.”
The programme doesn’t just impact the programme participants, it extends to the rest of the team and communities the business operates in.
Its recruitment team has even noted that candidates have pointed to the RAW Talent programme as the reason they want to join the company.
“We’ve had some fantastic people join through the RAW Talent programme, because they want to work with that,” Gale remembered. “It attracts good business, attracts good people – suppliers, investors, customers and team members.”
Due to the success Cook has had with its RAW Talent programme, Gale called on other employers to set up a similar scheme. “Go for it, give it a whirl,” she encouraged.
“The best things are often the ones that have a challenge around them. But as we face those challenges and get good at handling them we will get better, and a diverse and inclusive workplace is surely what everyone’s after.”
She also called on the government to support businesses to help people back to work: “If the private sector was incentivised in some way to take on people who are long-term unemployed or who have barriers, it feels like a really obvious solution to tackle employment, and it’s money well spent, and feels like the right thing to do.”
