Companies Build Management Depth By Hiring Entry-Level Staff and Letting Them Reshape The Culture
When we look at succession coming through the business, if we're not hiring at the entry level, then we're not developing the future talent who will eventually have to come in and manage the workforce.
Anne-Marie Butts
Chief People Officer
LHi Group
Entry-level roles are the first thing most companies cut when hiring budgets tighten. A junior hire costs money for months before the work pays for itself, and AI tools now handle some of what those hires used to do. Recent college graduates in the US are feeling the result, with unemployment around 5.6% and underemployment at 42% in the second quarter of 2026. The bill arrives years later, when those companies go looking for managers they would once have grown themselves.
Anne-Marie Butts is Chief People Officer at LHi Group, an employee-owned specialist recruitment company with nine offices across the US, UK, and Europe. She joined in 2012, when the business was 35 people in London, and has built its talent acquisition, learning, and HR functions through every stage of growth since. Butts leads people strategy across all four of the group’s brands and works on both sides of the Atlantic, which gives her two labor markets to compare.
“When we look at succession coming through the business, if we’re not hiring at the entry level, then we’re not developing the future talent who will eventually have to come in and manage the workforce,” says Butts. Companies promote managers from people they hired several years earlier and developed along the way. A hiring budget set now decides who will be available to run a team later. Butts made that calculation and went ahead with a hiring class her peers were cutting.
Building the next management layer
Recruitment industry roundtables gave Butts a clear view of where her peers were putting their money. Firms whose product is people were moving budget out of headcount and into technology, and she heard the same account across the table repeatedly. “In the recruitment industry, you’ll often hear businesses talking about their investment moving to the tools rather than the people,” notes Butts. “We took the opposite strategy this year.”
LHi hired roughly 60 entry-level people over the past year, most of them into the US business. Butts credits the practice of bringing people up through the company with much of its growth since she joined. The last group of comparable size joined four years ago, when graduates faced less competition for each opening. “They’re really committed and they’re working hard and they want to be a part of a business,” explains Butts. “I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that it is a tougher market for people coming out of education.”
The tougher market shows up more sharply in the UK, where unemployment among 16 to 24 year olds reached 16.2% in the spring of 2026, an eleven-year high. More applicants per opening means more screening, and the tools candidates now use have made that screening slower. “When we’re interviewing people, often they’ll be on an AI tool, and we’re having to sift through them,” says Butts. “‘Are you reading from a script,’ type scenarios, which is an interesting challenge for us.”
Support at every life stage
Keeping hires is a different problem from finding them. The benefits that carry people through hard times mostly go to employees further along in their lives than LHi’s entry-level recruits. A 24-year-old is unlikely to need bereavement leave or time off to care for a parent this year, but can still watch how the company treats a colleague who does. “Family friendly doesn’t necessarily only mean having children. It’s caring for relatives,” says Butts. “If I see that somebody is being treated well at that part of their life, then perhaps I’ll think this is an organization that I want to be with longer term.”
BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Index puts employees aged 26 to 30 at an eNPS of 31, the lowest of any age group and seventeen points below the 51 to 60 cohort. Younger workers also lose the most satisfaction when it falls across a company, and they take the longest to recover. The report recommends career development and manager training designed for a specific career stage rather than for an average employee.
LHi runs two programs of that kind: Younger You and Future You. Younger You asks managers to think back to their own first years in the business, since most of them were promoted for strong performance rather than for management skill. Future You asks employees where they want to end up, including plans that would take them somewhere else. “We have conversations with people early on in their careers about what their dreams are,” notes Butts. “Is it that they want to set up their own business one day, or is it that they want to move abroad? How can we be the vehicle for you to get you to your dream quicker?”
Feedback from the newest hires
New hires notice things about a company that people who have been there for years have stopped seeing. Butts treats asking them what they see as part of the deal of hiring them. The answers often point at arrangements longer-serving staff have grown comfortable with. “Culture as an organization doesn’t sit with policies and HR. It sits with everyone across the group,” says Butts. “If we’re committing to hiring entry-level people, then we have to be committed to evolving a culture based on the feedback they’re giving.”
Employee communities at LHi meet quarterly and report to the board. Butts encourages new hires to join in their first week, so someone still learning the company sits in the room when issues are raised. “They want their manager to be listening. They want to feel heard, and they want to be developed,” adds Butts.
A quarterly community program needs enough people to fill it. Butts ran the people function alone earlier in her career, asking staff what they liked, what they disliked, and what the company should start or stop doing, then took the answers to the leadership team in the words people had used. She also sits with teams while they work and speaks with members directly. “Be present and see it for yourself, sitting with the people and talking to them,” concludes Butts. “Understand really what it’s like to work in that business for that individual, and you can then be the person who is accountable for making the difference at the top level.”
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TL;DR
Anne-Marie Butts
LHi Group
Chief People Officer
Chief People Officer
Entry-level roles are the first thing most companies cut when hiring budgets tighten. A junior hire costs money for months before the work pays for itself, and AI tools now handle some of what those hires used to do. Recent college graduates in the US are feeling the result, with unemployment around 5.6% and underemployment at 42% in the second quarter of 2026. The bill arrives years later, when those companies go looking for managers they would once have grown themselves.
Anne-Marie Butts is Chief People Officer at LHi Group, an employee-owned specialist recruitment company with nine offices across the US, UK, and Europe. She joined in 2012, when the business was 35 people in London, and has built its talent acquisition, learning, and HR functions through every stage of growth since. Butts leads people strategy across all four of the group’s brands and works on both sides of the Atlantic, which gives her two labor markets to compare.
“When we look at succession coming through the business, if we’re not hiring at the entry level, then we’re not developing the future talent who will eventually have to come in and manage the workforce,” says Butts. Companies promote managers from people they hired several years earlier and developed along the way. A hiring budget set now decides who will be available to run a team later. Butts made that calculation and went ahead with a hiring class her peers were cutting.
Building the next management layer
Recruitment industry roundtables gave Butts a clear view of where her peers were putting their money. Firms whose product is people were moving budget out of headcount and into technology, and she heard the same account across the table repeatedly. “In the recruitment industry, you’ll often hear businesses talking about their investment moving to the tools rather than the people,” notes Butts. “We took the opposite strategy this year.”
LHi hired roughly 60 entry-level people over the past year, most of them into the US business. Butts credits the practice of bringing people up through the company with much of its growth since she joined. The last group of comparable size joined four years ago, when graduates faced less competition for each opening. “They’re really committed and they’re working hard and they want to be a part of a business,” explains Butts. “I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that it is a tougher market for people coming out of education.”
The tougher market shows up more sharply in the UK, where unemployment among 16 to 24 year olds reached 16.2% in the spring of 2026, an eleven-year high. More applicants per opening means more screening, and the tools candidates now use have made that screening slower. “When we’re interviewing people, often they’ll be on an AI tool, and we’re having to sift through them,” says Butts. “‘Are you reading from a script,’ type scenarios, which is an interesting challenge for us.”
Support at every life stage
Keeping hires is a different problem from finding them. The benefits that carry people through hard times mostly go to employees further along in their lives than LHi’s entry-level recruits. A 24-year-old is unlikely to need bereavement leave or time off to care for a parent this year, but can still watch how the company treats a colleague who does. “Family friendly doesn’t necessarily only mean having children. It’s caring for relatives,” says Butts. “If I see that somebody is being treated well at that part of their life, then perhaps I’ll think this is an organization that I want to be with longer term.”
BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Index puts employees aged 26 to 30 at an eNPS of 31, the lowest of any age group and seventeen points below the 51 to 60 cohort. Younger workers also lose the most satisfaction when it falls across a company, and they take the longest to recover. The report recommends career development and manager training designed for a specific career stage rather than for an average employee.
LHi runs two programs of that kind: Younger You and Future You. Younger You asks managers to think back to their own first years in the business, since most of them were promoted for strong performance rather than for management skill. Future You asks employees where they want to end up, including plans that would take them somewhere else. “We have conversations with people early on in their careers about what their dreams are,” notes Butts. “Is it that they want to set up their own business one day, or is it that they want to move abroad? How can we be the vehicle for you to get you to your dream quicker?”
Feedback from the newest hires
New hires notice things about a company that people who have been there for years have stopped seeing. Butts treats asking them what they see as part of the deal of hiring them. The answers often point at arrangements longer-serving staff have grown comfortable with. “Culture as an organization doesn’t sit with policies and HR. It sits with everyone across the group,” says Butts. “If we’re committing to hiring entry-level people, then we have to be committed to evolving a culture based on the feedback they’re giving.”
Employee communities at LHi meet quarterly and report to the board. Butts encourages new hires to join in their first week, so someone still learning the company sits in the room when issues are raised. “They want their manager to be listening. They want to feel heard, and they want to be developed,” adds Butts.
A quarterly community program needs enough people to fill it. Butts ran the people function alone earlier in her career, asking staff what they liked, what they disliked, and what the company should start or stop doing, then took the answers to the leadership team in the words people had used. She also sits with teams while they work and speaks with members directly. “Be present and see it for yourself, sitting with the people and talking to them,” concludes Butts. “Understand really what it’s like to work in that business for that individual, and you can then be the person who is accountable for making the difference at the top level.”