Pink is running a graduate training programme to bring new faces into the mortgage and protection industry.

The firm is using parent LSL’s recruitment team to run a campaign to attract graduates to financial services.

The campaign started at the beginning of August and Pink says it has been inundated with applications already.

The graduates will be trained by Pink and then placed in Pink network firms. Pink will also be responsible for the graduates’ supervision during the first three months.

The first graduate selection day will take place on the 4 October. The graduates will be introduced to Pink network, receive an overview of the mortgage and protection market, and go through a selection process.

For the successful candidates this will be followed up with a four-day training course and then ongoing training in the field. The graduates will be trained as life and protection sellers to help mortgage firms who find that they are now too busy to give protection sales the attention that they deserve since the pickup in mortgage sales.

The training will be based on the Aviva Academy that Pink has run in conjunction with Aviva for the past 12 months for experienced mortgage brokers who wanted to sell more protection.

Jeff Woods, business development director at Pink, said: “Financial services is an aging industry with the average age of advisers in most firms across the industry at about 50. At Pink we think it is essential to bring in some new blood; we also think it is vital to increase the number of people who are trained to sell protection at a time when government benefits are lower than ever but protection sales are falling.

“Pink’s graduate training scheme will bring bright, young graduates into the industry, provide them with great training, both in the classroom and in the field and will do its part both to help our network firms and to reduce the protection gap.”