At Arcadia we’re clear about talent, its importance to us, and how we define it.

From experience we know that talented people who have what it takes to progress have a few things in common:

• Awareness - they are self-aware and are tuned in to the commercial and people environment around them
• Energy - they have the vision and drive to enable themselves and their teams to achieve great things
• Judgement - they make sound decisions, balancing intuition with detailed knowledge and facts
• Influence - they make things happen by influencing others directly and indirectly

One starting point for our talent pipeline is with our graduate and management trainee programmes – we’re committed to recruiting and developing fresh new talent into our business.

We also place great importance on spotting and developing talent internally. As well as measuring current performance through the annual appraisal process, we also take a view on future potential through succession reviews. Each of our brands are focused on spotting talented individuals already in our store network and head office departments and developing them to take on bigger roles.

Individuals typically get the opportunity to showcase their potential and receive development feedback. A range of successional development programmes exist across the brands for major career stages and even at a senior level we have the Business Leadership Programme, aimed at developing talented individuals through to Director level. In addition, programmes like Personal Development Planning and One-to-One Coaching assist in accelerating high-potential development in the business.