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The Pillars of an Award-Winning Program
Burns & McDonnell was selected as a 2024 Campus Forward Award Winner for their unwavering commitment to seeking out and hiring early career talent and investments in nurturing and retaining the next generation of diverse talent. Please see below for the highlights of their approach to early career recruitment.
Multi-Faceted and Thoughtful Approach to University Recruitment
The early career team at Burns & McDonnell focuses on identifying top talent from a variety of colleges and universities, majors, and sources to build a diverse pipeline of candidates. With an emphasis on pipelining talent, the team created a role that specifically focuses on identifying future candidates alongside current hiring needs. The role focuses on proactively identifying future candidates for smaller candidate pools through virtual events and meaningful communication. The team engages these future candidates throughout the year and reinitiates hiring processes as new positions open. From giveaways to music playlists, the team creates dynamic relationships and offers candidates career development and job search insight.
Innovative Use of Technology
Technology is viewed as and operates as a critical partner to the team to provide a timely, transparent, and engaged experience for candidates. Technology enhances the campus event and career fair experience, as strategic communication begins pre-event to educate potential candidates on the company’s current openings and important information about the various business lines, company locations and career opportunities. Following events, candidates receive timely communication recognizing their attendance at events and the next steps in the recruitment process. Many interviews take place virtually and at different times of day/days of the week to accommodate candidate schedules. With an emphasis on transparency, technology assists the early career team in providing insight into the recruitment process and leads to positive outcomes of placement into positions or into the pipeline of candidates for future opportunities.
Overarching Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion
Through intimate partnerships with employee resource groups and other internal DE&I advocates, the early career team strategically creates and maintains relationships with HBCUs, HSIs, student organizations and campus minority programs. These efforts not only focus on providing realistic insight into company culture and career development opportunities they intend to create meaningful relationships with Burns & McDonnell employee-owners to provide mentorship and personal development for the students and assist in navigating the student’s job search. The company’s national diversity conference program also creates conversations between top students and company executives in an effort to create dynamic relationships and provide immediate traction in the hiring of top talent.