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The Pillars of an Award-Winning Program
Credera was selected as a 2023 Campus Forward Award Winner for their unwavering commitment to seeking out and hiring early career talent, their emphasis on diversity & inclusion, and investments in nurturing and retaining the next generation of talent. Please see below for the highlights of their approach to early career recruitment.
Demonstrated Investment in Early Career Hiring
Credera’s mission is to make an extraordinary impact for its clients, people, and communities. Living out the ‘people’ component includes investing in early career talent and creating opportunities for extraordinary growth, learning, and development. After all, it’s one thing to recruit campus hires, but it’s another to create an environment that encourages learning and curiosity while coaching and supporting early talent through meaningful and challenging work. To accomplish this, hundreds of employees across all levels of the firm support early career talent, including recruiting efforts, onboarding, mentorship programs, and ongoing learning and development. To put it simply, campus recruiting is the lifeblood of Credera and the foundation of its growth model. Credera invests in early career talent because it believes students are the future leaders of the firm.
Innovative and Multi-Faceted Approach to University Recruitment
Crederas’ people-first core value inspires its approach to sourcing and recruiting early career talent. Credera understands that no two students or universities are alike. Because of this, it takes a structured yet flexible approach to engagement, which includes an emphasis on year-round relationship-building and connection. The recruiting team follows a tiered approach to university engagement and has developed clear criteria to adjust the companies’ level of engagement year-over-year to meet business objectives. Credera is dedicated to making the recruiting experience accessible for students, and offers both in-person and virtual programming designed to introduce consulting as a career path and support the development of student’s professional skills through a variety of soft skills workshops. Credera also offers a completely virtual 2-week interview process from application to offer that can be completed from anywhere, while providing students access to Credera’s culture, potential future teammates, and the firm’s leaders.
Overarching Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion
Credera is passionate about engaging with diverse talent in order to create a workplace that reflects the communities that we live and serve in. Credera provides dedicated sponsorship dollars to each of its 15 target university teams to support exclusive engagement with DE&I groups across these campuses. During the past recruiting year, Credera provided sponsorship to 29 different DE&I-focused student organizations. Credera also identifies external partners to support its diversity recruiting initiatives and attends events and national conferences such as SWE’s WE Conference, NSBE’s Annual Convention, and NACE’s HBCU Summit. Credera values maintaining relationships with prospective students and leverages RippleMatch’s Communities feature to share future opportunities and relevant company updates. In addition to recruitment efforts, Credera has six ERGs, including CredColor, Open Pride and the Credera Women’s Network, designed to provide mentorship, allyship, and ongoing support to new hires throughout their career.
Impactful Internship Program
Credera interns are staffed on current internal and external projects, where they gain real-world experience solving complex client challenges with a team of Credera consultants. In addition to their project work, interns will participate in ‘Credera Community Impact’ service opportunities, ongoing learning and development sessions, as well as cultural events that introduce interns to the various career paths available within the firm and create opportunities for relationship-building. At the end of the summer, all interns gather in Dallas, TX for a two-day Leadership Develop Conference, where each session is designed to provide interns with the tools, resources, and guidance to be successful in whatever career path they choose to pursue. The firm’s top priority is to provide an honest demonstration of Credera’s culture and consulting engagements so that students feel empowered and informed when making a decision on their potential return offer.
Growth and Development of the Next Generation of Talent
Before starting client work, new hires are introduced to Credera’s best practices and unique approach to consulting through a weeklong program called ‘Credera-U’. This is followed by several weeks of training related to their specific role, which equips them with the technical or craft skills unique to their position. Beyond the first week, they will participate in the ‘First Year Consultant Program’ (FYCP), as well as the ‘Core Program’. FYCP highlights how the firm’s core values guide its approach to consulting while the Core Program provides opportunities to develop skills and explore capabilities, technologies, and industries early on in their career. All new hires are also paired with a dedicated career coach that they will meet with monthly to receive feedback, career advice, and support — both as an individual and a professional. Finally, all Crederians are given 40 hours of ‘training time off’ to create additional space for professional development.