Internship Summary

Today marks the last day of my internship with #Hays Shanghai. This is truly a sleepless night, I've never expected my first internship experience to be so emotionally loaded that I basically cried about leaving, and I'm truly grateful that I've chosen Hays as my first workplace station to sharpen my professional skills during the last year of my undergrad. It symbolizes many things I've dreamed about a workplace: diversity and inclusion, equality, social responsibility, professionalism, etc.?

Hays first attracted my attention amongst hundreds of different companies due to its logo and design, the tranquil blue makes me feel calm and peaceful. Then the more I researched about it, the more I became hooked. It is a company with a long history starting from the UK and expanded its footprints globally, it believes the potential of the right candidates to change organizations and the wider world, and it trusts the right opportuniies could transform individuals' lives, it's both an ambitious and humanitarian organization, some of its former leadership even had the experience of coaching fortune 500 company executives.

Starting from my first interaction with Hays since this May, the recruiters have been more than passionate about my personal stories, I applied for four different offices in China just so that the HR could notice me, and to my surprise, the managing director directly arranged me to interview with the managers of different regions so that we could familiarize with each other, the flexible and efficient interview process impressed me as the character of a great company. From the Hays' newsletter earlier, the openness of this company to basically allow lots of freedom for its consultants to develop their own clients and recruiting businesses is making everyone their own entrepreneurs.

Since coming to Hays Shanghai, my experience has been fillled with unlimited laughters, amazing friendships, joys and support, even though sometimes with a bit of frustrations due to the challenging nature of our job. I will never forget Alice invited me to Taikoohui’s buildings and her enthusiasm and beauty made me more than thrilled to join the company. She also helped me prepare my onboarding materials and chose a desk location I enjoyed a lot. I will also forever appreciate my humorous and supportive boss Max Shen, who never pressures us too much with KPI results, but requires us of more professionalism, and allows more free space for us to hunt our talents with our own flexible means. He has a good eye for the unique advantage of each of the interns or consultants in our team, whether it is our networking/sourcing or language skills, and he always makes us cover the roles we will be good at.?

As a junior intern, I felt the incredible trust that the team had put on me, I covered many important positions for my boss, these exposure to highly talented candidates had sharpened my business acumen and transformed my thinking about the workplace. The joyful moments with H factor, the trainings I have gained from lunch&learns, the mentors and amazing artists I have met, Lisa Zhang (professional and very caring for others), Sherry (expert in real estate asset management, our min boss), Florence, Xue Yang, Kate (top dancer and always so energetic, knowledgeable and self-driven), Zixuan, Gwen Gwen, Chris, Sunny, Gary, Vera, Jack, and many other amazing leaders and friends I sincerely appreciate, hopefully are going to be my lifelong assets and partners.

Hays people are sooo talented and diverse, they are firstly good people with diverse hobbies (dancing, football, writing, reading) and integrity/good characters, before they are good and professional consultants who know and research a lot about their clients and candidates. They do not just deliver average results, but they think and contemplate about the market and companies as business analysts, and they provide human capital solutions. From Hays Help to Hays' charity programs and ESG (environmental protection project), Hays strives to do the right thing and commit to its social responsibilities.

Currently I have to take a short leave due to schooling reasons and my potential enthusiasm in the Public Relations industry, but I am more than happy to recommend Hays to any undergraduate student looking to expand your visions about the workplace, or want to develop a long term career with amazing colleagues and live in a good corporate culture. Joining Hays, you will be exposed to a transparent and fair promotional system, premium working environment, gender diversity, fast track career development, trainings and self-made presentations/lunch&learns, fun colleagues with global visions and cross-cultural understandings, and nice meals and treats every once in a while, all in one place.

Until next time, the story has not ended.