Building an Innovative and Multi-Faceted Approach to University Recruiting

Polaris uses a variety of sourcing approaches to ensure they are building and casting a wide net. In order to accomplish this, the team conducts a demand planning process early in the summer before the prior internship season, which allows them to post early talent positions prior to the fall season to begin sourcing and branding. The team also partners with their top university partners to ensure their students are made aware of upcoming recruitment at their university. Through Polaris' partnership with RippleMatch in 2021, they have seen success in pull-through from diverse, technical talent as the team works towards a school-agnostic approach for diversity recruitment initiatives. Polaris also utilized creative digital strategies, including providing accepted hires a pre-formatted acceptance photo to post and share that they are joining the Polaris team. This helped the team to see an uptick in requisition applications from a wide variety of schools and sources, which allowed the team to continue to tell the Polaris story.

Crafting a Standout Candidate Experience

Polaris values the candidate experience as the team works to ensure the candidate can evaluate the opportunity and feel apart of the team throughout the interview process and beyond. The team works to set the candidate up for success by crafting the job postings to be accurate description in the role qualifications as well as an enhanced experience on the careers page where candidates can review videos and testimonials on programs, company news, culture and values, DEI, community give back programs, and sustainability. Throughout interactions with the candidate, from initial phone conversation through interview and offer, the recruiter and hiring teams work to develop an intentional relationship with the candidate, which allows all parties to ensure the position is the right fit for both parties. The Polaris team has received many compliments from candidates and new hires on their inclusive interview process where the relationship really stood out to them vs other companies they were in consideration with.

Moving the Needle on Diversity & Inclusion

Polaris recruits and retains diverse early career talent through relationships and intentional programming. Relationships are at the heart of how the team wants to tell their story and retain talent. New hires get to experience the values and opportunity when they come onboard and how it aligns to what they learned about in the interview process and more! For early ID, the teams continue to invest in Code2College as a way to support early education in STEM, which Polaris is excited to see how they can support talent from an earlier stage and build their story even earlier. In the technical space, Polaris continues to invest in partnerships with SWE and NSBE at the local and national level along with specific student groups at their top tier universities to grow representation in their programs. The team continues to reflect and analyze those partnerships and explore across the technical and functional spaces, especially by partnering with hires in programs for their involvement.