Hannah Vallerie started her tour of top university campuses about six months earlier than usual this year.
The human resources manager for ING bank wanted to steal a march on rivals in an attempt to recruit graduates to the Dutch lender for its international leadership programme.
To make the job more enticing, ING, which typically hires an average of four out of 600 US applicants every year, moved the final event of the three-year programme from the group’s headquarters in Amsterdam to a remote training camp in Portugal. According to Cliff Belzer, a Harvard graduate who joined the “Orange leaders” programme in September 2011, it is stuffed with “fun” extracurricular activities, such as staffing food trucks and painting rooms.