Organisations pay growing attention to talent management, booming field both from academic and practitioner perspectives, and especially to global talent management, a “critical element of strategic human resource management in the multinational enterprise” (Scullion et al., 2010). Nevertheless, academic literature on talent management seems to have overlooked so far graduate management, and graduate literature disregards the link between their management and corporate strategy. We argue that connecting graduate policies and corporate strategy is essential in order to adequately manage this key population. In order to contribute to this subject, we carried out a participant observation research to study the role of a HR team in charge of global graduate policies in a European bank. The strategy-as-practice approach (Jarzabkowski, 2004; Whittington, 2006) provides an adapted model to analyse the observed team’s "micro-practices" (Rouleau, 2005) actions and efforts to contribute to the strategy of the organisation. The concept of strategic episode (Hendry and Seidl, 2003) was used to structure the results of the observation. This communication proposes contributions at three levels: theoretical, methodological and practical. From a theoretical point of view, we treat the link between graduate management and corporate strategy, not covered by the existing literature. From a methodological perspective, we use strategy-as-practice to study HR issues, which constitutes an innovative application of this discipline. Finally, from a practical point of view, we highlight the roles, practices and skills through which, in a given context, HR project teams can become “strategy doers” (Whittington, 1996) in organisations.
