Cultivating the Future

Eighty percent of the 1,000 full-time hires that GE makes in the U.S. from colleges each year come from interns and co-ops, so it goes without saying that recruiting a diverse group of interns will lead to diversity within the company’s employee ranks.

“If I only had $100 to spend on recruiting, I’d spend all $100 on interns and co-ops,” said Steve Canale, the manager of recruiting and staffing services at GE. “The reason for that is because when you have a total of 2,300 interns at our different GE locations, and if we give them a good experience we make them what we refer to as a net promoter of GE. They’ll go back to campus and be our brand ambassador on campus and have more of a positive impact for us than anything else we can possibly do. The kids are so bombarded by messaging from employers, whether it be from the newspaper, a website, or even a career fair, they really don’t know what to believe. What they believe in more than anything is a friend or a peer of theirs at their college who comes back after a summer internship at GE and speaks of how great an experience they had with us.”

Attracting students from underrepresented groups into internship programs is a challenge for any technology company, so a broad-based recruiting strategy is integral. GE works with diversity associations like the Society of Women Engineers, the National Society of Black Engineers, the National Black MBA Association, the National Society of Hispanic MBAs and others to find the most qualified students to join their internship and co-op programs.

“We attract diversity through the same door that we attract top talent through,” Canale said. “A lot of the top diversity candidates are at the top schools because students get attracted there by scholarships and other incentives.

For example, if five percent of the students in Purdue University’s engineering program, which is one of the 10 best in the country, are African American, we have a higher quality confidence in those students because they got into Purdue’s first-rate engineering program, so that’s where we focus our efforts.”

When it comes to actively recruiting on college campuses, GE has identified 40 schools, referred to as GE’s Executive Schools, at which they focus their recruiting efforts. These 40 schools, which include Boston College, Ohio State University, Cornell and Notre Dame, are selected based on academic excellence and GE’s ability to build a recruiting team with the alumni of the school, among many other factors. “Everybody wants to be one of those 40 schools,” Canale said. “It really comes down to a question of resources and market segmentation because we only have so many people and so much money to devote to recruiting, so we must to do it wisely. Therefore, we made the conscious decision not to spread the peanut butter too thin and really double down at those 40 schools. We pull students from another 100 schools, but we’re not as active at those schools. So, it’s not like we ignore all other schools, but its at those 40 schools we have selected where we place the majority of our efforts and investment.”

Read more on page 26 of Insight Into Diversity.