DLA Piper wins top Student Employer award

We are delighted to have won the award for 'Best Work Experience, Internship or Placement Programme' at the prestigious Institute of Student Employer awards 2021.

This is a fantastic achievement for the firm and testament to the hard work that has been invested into designing and delivering this now award-winning programme. The ISE Awards are the benchmark for outstanding performance across all industries, and they recognise and reward excellence at the highest level. We are proud to be the winners in such a competitive category.

Like every organisation, our international Early Careers programmes have had to adapt to and overcome a number of challenges during the pandemic. As we have adapted our programmes to be run virtually, we have ensured that we never compromise quality or the candidate experience.

Our increased focus on diversity and inclusion and levelling the playing field for candidates made a significant impression on the judging panel and was a key factor in us winning this award. The judges were particularly impressed by our “crystal-clear” vision of a bridge to employment, achieved by creating a solid pathway from “pre to post” internship. This in itself is high praise as it recognises the firm’s fantastic pathway from our Summer Internship programme, which runs in the UK, Ireland, Hong Kong, UAE and Australia, to our International Graduate Programme.

We were also delighted to achieve highly commended in the “Best Assessment and Selection Process” category for our internally designed, strengths-based recruitment process that was launched this year. Judges commented that we “demonstrated impressive results to improve diversity” and had implemented “a remarkable self-designed assessment process”.

We have made significant changes to our Early Careers recruitment and development strategy over the past few years. We are delighted that these changes are being recognised externally by industry professionals.