Nicole Furnia - Nominee for Exceptional Leader Award - 2023 Campus Recruiting Choice Awards

Nicole is the Director of Early Talent, University Relations and Employer Branding for the Americas at ABB. Nicole is responsible for the overall strategy and operations of the ABB early talent programs including the Summer, Fall, and Spring internship program, as well as the full-time rotational program called 'Discovery' in the US, Canada, and Mexico. In addition, Nicole also manages the strategy around ABB's university recruiting presence in all three countries. Prior to her role at ABB, Nicole was the Director of University Relations at Arrive Logistics and prior to that, Nicole was the University Relations Manager in North America for Eaton Corp. The early talent/university relations space is Nicole's passion. After spending the last 13 years of her career in this space Nicole has seen it grow tremendously, become a key strategic priority for many organizations, and believes what we do on campus and in these programs makes a significant impact on each company, each day.

Career Highlight

"In the past year my team has done a tremendous job of partnering and communicating more closely with our business partners. We've helped the business to build and grow more intentional, centralized Discovery rotational programs that better solve for the organizational and people challenges are business partners are seeing. Today the Discovery Program hiring makes up about 25% of the total US early talent hiring annually, but also has shown our leaders that programmatic hiring carries better performance, better retention and better diversity. Annually the Discovery program has 55% female hires and 30% ethnic diversity."