Hit the ground running – from your first day at RB

At the beginning of my career in 2007, I was surprised by the level of responsibility and ownership I was given without hardly any formal induction.

When you start working straight after university, you expect a soft beginning where your new colleagues take your hand and introduce you to this new stage of your life – the professional life.

I talked previously about flat organisations and how their lack of bureaucracy and fast decision making means that employees and their work are very visible.

And I asked whether everyone is up for this sort of scrutiny at the very start of their career?

I had been told when you start working for a multinational company, people have no time to prepare a formal training or a formal induction period in order to make your start smoother.

And when I started at RB, it was exactly the same: From day 1 I was working at a very fast pace. And this is a good thing: in this kind of industry and in this kind of company you really have to react and think fast. So better to start running from the very beginning rather than doing some stretching!

We always tell new interns and new hires that in RB we really trust in the idea of “working by doing”. Some formal training on technicalities (i.e. specific software), the company insists you are part of from the very beginning.

So when you join RB you can expect a real job with real responsibilities from day one.

At first I thought the lack of induction was just an excuse, a polite way to say that there is no time to prepare a soft start for graduates.

But being able to react and face such a fast-working reality, having these challenging opportunities and early responsibility is a training in itself. And if you want to be part of it, you need to start running from the recruiting phase..

You can hear one of our marketing directors talk about learning on the job on the Success Stories section of our website.

Francesco was looking for a company with a reputation for entrepreneurship – one that gave its people a lot of freedom to build and drive the business. Since then he’s progressed quickly from initial marketing roles through to global brand positions, and has now become the Marketing Director of one of our key regions.

Here he talks about how he got there; about the uncompromising nature of the Reckitt Benckiser culture; and about learning by doing and tapping into the company’s “goldmine of knowledge”.

Click on the picture (left) to watch the video.