Get on campus
If you want to have the best interns, then you have to have solid relationships with local colleges and universities, and to do that, you have to invest both people and time.
“It starts with making certain that you have our folks who spend time on campus getting to know the students as well as making sure that the students have the opportunity to get to know us and what we stand for,” McDonnough says.
When he’s sending people out to campuses, it’s not just simply something he asks an employee to add into the schedule. Instead, because it’s an important role, assign it as a full-time position. In most cases, a partner serves in the role of campus coordinator along with a team of client-serving professionals, and that team is augmented by full-time professional recruiters on staff. All of these team members and recruiters have had experience working with clients throughout their careers at the firm, so they know what it takes to be successful in E&Y’s culture.
Typically, it’s one partner per campus, although if schools are small, a campus leader may have two schools that he or she oversees, and the company often tries to match alumni up with their respective alma maters, so they already have an idea of the school.
“We like to have long-term consistency in our key campus leaders,” he says. “We’d have someone who has spent many years on that campus so they know the campus, and more importantly, they know the professors, so they’d have the rapport with those professors to know what type of person a specific student would be, and then have a dialogue and discussion around, ‘Do you think that person would be successful in the type of culture that we have?’”
Campus leaders should be focused on building relationships with faculty and staff.
“Spending time with them on campus is key,” he says. “Making certain that they have access to our thought leadership that we provide, that they can use in their classrooms or their lectures is also a critical part.”
Acknowledge the importance of the role those professors play.
“I think it’s just being respectful of the role that they play, and it’s a critical role in the development of the key people who will be a key part of our future, …” he says. “When you go on campus, make certain you understand and are being respectful of the role that those professors are playing in the development of those students that will be your future is something that we need to do and still need to do when we reach out to them. Sometimes there’s a view that we take them for granted, and we never, never want to do that.”
Your recruiters also need to know the students. E&Y’s staff first does this through having social hours on campus two to four times during an academic year.
“One thing that we don’t do is we don’t have alcohol on any of our recruiting visits,” McDonnough says. “That’s not part of the social time. We believe that the social time is really business time, where we get to have meaningful interaction with the students, be able to properly evaluate that student’s social skills and interpersonal skills and use that as another piece of information that we utilize in evaluating that student along with their abilities that they’ve demonstrated in their classroom.”
During these socials, recruiters are looking for students who have qualities that could make them successful at the firm.
“It’s the ability to carry on a conversation, eye contact, feeling comfortable in a discussion and willing to participate in a discussion,” McDonnough says. “Those kinds of things that we can identify that are consistent with somebody who could be comfortable in dealing with people. We are a technical business, but no doubt about it, that technical business is done by people, so it’s important that you have the ability to interact with folks both in our company at Ernst & Young and our clients.”
Look at their intelligence and awareness to find the right fit.
“You also get a sense for just the whole general business knowledge,” he says. “Are they able to demonstrate that they have a good knack for what’s happening in the business community, what’s happening in the economy? That kind of discussion is part of a dialogue that our people have with the students during those activities.”
The next step after the socials is on-campus interviews with the standout students, conducted by the recruiting team.
“That interview, in a lot of cases, is a validation of what we had known,” he says. “In a lot of cases, because we know the students so well, it’s us making sure we know what they want to accomplish in both their internship and where they want to go on a full-time basis. That includes, what city are you looking at? What kind of service line are you interested in doing? What kind of industry are you interested in, if you want to focus on an industry? That’s the kind of dialogue that’s happening in the interview process.”
This provides them with another opportunity to see how that student will handle him or herself, only this time in a one-on-one situation.
After campus interviews, the individual campus teams meet, and they’ll come back and meet with the other schools’ teams to compare notes between campuses.
“Then, depending on our hiring needs from an office perspective, we then go back and decide who to make offers to to come into the office,” McDon
no
ugh says. “By and large, if you get an offer to come into the office, again, given the amount of history we have had with these students, we will offer an internship after their office visit.”
The number of interns varies based on the work needed, but this year, 90 bright-eyed interns started. Going through this entire process helps reduce the possibility of surprises when they actually get working.
“Because of the amount of due diligence that our campus coordinators do, both in the pre-interview process, talking with professors, getting to know these students on campus, we have a really good idea,” he says. “You combine that with how well they’re doing in their studies, we have a really good idea of who we would like to bring in before we even go into the interview process, so we do a lot of homework.”
