athenahealth is a Campus Forward Award Winner

Building an Innovative and Multi-Faceted Approach to University Recruiting

Faced with another year of uncertainty with the Delta Variant, athenahealth was able to still engage with multiple campus's across different platforms. The team joined a partnership with Handshake which enables them to directly reach out to candidates that would be a good fit for their roles. They have also implemented Yello which is enabling their team to host events to different groups on campus to share information about our internships. In addition to investing in new technologies they have been utilizing their past interns to help engage with different campus's and understand how to best reach the student populations.

Crafting a Standout Candidate Experience

The Campus & Intern Programming team at athenahealth prides themselves on developing a flawless and timely interview process. As a team of two, the team does their best to connect with every candidate that they receive as they know that each candidate has something unique to offer. Each candidate has contact with both of the members of the Campus team so that they have multiple places to get questions answered. The team has created materials that allow the candidate to understand the company culture and the resources that are available to them upon joining.

Moving the Needle on Diversity & Inclusion

With the focus on early career talent, the team has engaged the Executive Leadership Team as well as the Executive Director of Diversity & Inclusion at athenahealth to help build strategies to engage diverse populations. One of the things that they are doing is utilizing internal HBCU alumni to understand the best way to recruit on campus. They have sponsored HBCU specific conferences such as the upcoming NACE HBCU conference. One thing that they did was invest in the data to understand what is keeping diverse talent at athenahealth and using that to guide the early career program. This includes starting education early with a transition program for those joining full time from college.

Investing in Impactful Internship Programs

One of the things that makes the internship program at athenahealth stand out is consistency. With such a small Campus team, they are able to interact with each hire prior to them starting. The team conducts beginning evaluations to understand the goals that each intern has. They then meet with them halfway through the program to ensure that they are getting the support that they need and are achieving their goals. The team is able to develop deep relationships with them that allow them to help the interns through the first 2-5 years of their careers. Interns work in intern specific teams on projects that directly impact the product. With a cloud based system, interns are able to see their accomplishments go live.

Supporting the Growth and Development of Entry-Level Talent

Something new that the team has developed is a Full Time Transition program. With the interns that they were able to convert to full time, there is now a 6-month program that introduces them to benefits, how to manage 401K, how to own projects within an organization as opposed to owning projects in a college setting. The team has reached out to all of their early career talent to understand what anxiety they have about joining and developing programs with the athenaUniversity team to develop trainings to alleviate those worries.

Congratulations to the team at athenahealth for being selected as one of the winners of RippleMatch's 2022 Campus Forward Awards!

RippleMatch's Campus Forward Awards recognizes the top early career teams and programs in the nation. Through a detailed application process, early career teams shared their approach to recruitment, candidate experience, D&I, and internship & entry-level programming. The programs picked for this award represent the best of the best, selected from applications submitted by campus recruiting teams across industries.

See all Award Winners for the category of Mid-Size Early Career Programs below