This old-school twist turned Oracle into a top destination for college talent

Usually 24-year-old Taylor Rowland radiates confidence. He’s a recent graduate of Texas A&M, now sharpening his sales skills as a new hire at Oracle. Some of his favorite moments at the big software company come when potential customers try to shoo him away. “I’ll ask them: “Why are you afraid of comparing us to other vendors?” Rowland says, with a grin. He’s learning the art of turning “No” into “Maybe,” and occasionally even into “Yes.”

Yet even a go-getter like Rowland has jitters, and on a recent afternoon he wants to share them. “Everybody leaving college goes into their first job like a kindergartner starting school,” he confides. “What if they don't like me? What if I hate everything about it?”

When he joined Oracle’s Austin, Texas training center last August, “I wasn’t scared about job success,” Rowland says. “I was more like: ‘Am I going to have a friend? Am I going to be a good fit?’”

At many companies, such angst among 20-somethings is an unwelcome headache. Not at Oracle, which ranked No. 3 last year in LinkedIn’s list of the top destinations for recent college graduates. Oracle takes in raw recruits by the thousands, teaches them the fine points of selling -- and nudges the newcomers together in ways that create best friends.

Making the most of the college connection isn’t just a favorite project of Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. It’s also one of the factors that has propelled Oracle to the No. 9 spot on LinkedIn’s list of Top Companies in the U.S. this year, up from No. 26 two years ago. 

Let other tech companies woo millennials with the sugar high of endless on-the-job perks. Oracle is betting that camaraderie is more important than climbing walls; that fine-grain feedback matters more than free lunch. After all, Oracle’s legendary sales culture pinpoints customers’ pain points and then shows how the company’s tech offerings can bring relief. Its talent strategy approaches college students’ psyches the same way.

“We understand how important it is to have that first, successful onboarding,” explains Kim Levin, Oracle’s senior organization and talent development consultant. Jumping from college to the workplace can seem scary, she observes. If everyone else at work is older, better-skilled and disinclined to help, being the new kid can be a lonely, demoralizing struggle. That’s especially true for the most ambitious recruits, who feel shattered any time they fall out of step.

In 2013, Oracle began building its antidote, known as the “Class Of” training program. Today, Class Of starts with nonstop recruiting at a core group of 30 large universities. Most are big state schools such as Ohio State and the University of North Carolina; a few are private universities such as Baylor and Georgetown. Oracle then brings several thousand of these recruits to a year of on-the-job training in four hub cities that span the country: Austin, Texas; Burlington, Mass.; Reston, Va.; or Santa Monica, Calif.

Need housing? In Austin, Oracle-owned apartments are just a few minutes away from work. Need feedback? It’s constant. Eager to keep your college spirit alive? You’re encouraged to post a big felt pennant with your school’s name right next to your desk.

If this sounds like the way big U.S. companies welcomed the next generation of talent in the 1960s and 1970s, the answer is: “Yes, it is.” You’ll find lots of modern-day updates at the edges of Oracle’s program, including bite-sized video tutorials and 34-inch curved monitors at everyone’s desks. Fundamentally, though, Oracle is reviving the old-school approach of investing heavily in new hires – and trying to nurture loyalty in return.

Oracle was founded in 1977, which makes it a relatively young company within the Fortune 500 and a veritable grandpa by Silicon Valley’s standards. The Redwood Shores, Calif. company started as a database specialist and now books $40 billion a year in revenue by offering everything from cloud computing to human-resource software, middleware and computer servers. About 137,000 people work for Oracle, up 3% from a year ago.

Oracle’s 72-year-old founder, Larry Ellison, wins plenty of media coverage, particularly for eye-catching feats like sponsoring the winning sailing team in the America’s Cup, or buying the Hawaiian island of Lanai. He’s the seventh richest person on the planet, according to Forbes, with a net worth of $72 billion. But, as campus recruiting manager Jonathan Cary notes, “you can’t see, touch, or feel Oracle” in everyday life.

Instead, Oracle is the business-to-business company in the background. Its product line is intricate; its culture tilts more toward suits than hoodies. As a result, it’s taken years of work – and hundreds of school visits – for Oracle to win even a fraction of the campus visibility enjoyed by younger tech companies like Amazon and Google, whose services are part of student life.  

In the specialized world of business-to-business selling, though, Oracle rules. The company spends more than $8 billion a year on sales and marketing, equivalent to 21% of its annual revenue. For people who stay, the road to six-figure paychecks is wide and well-established. For alumni, an Oracle sales pedigree is likely to impress recruiters throughout the rest of your career.

Oracle won’t discuss pay packages, but people who have entered the company’s sales-training programs, right out of college, say starting pay is about $50,000 a year, with strong performers eligible for performance bonuses that can reach $25,000. Promotion opportunities start showing up in about a year. There’s a clear pathway to bigger sales jobs; there’s also the opportunity to switch into other specialties at Oracle.

All the same, Oracle’s Class Of program begins with some profoundly unglamorous work. Don’t be fooled by the newcomers’ smoothly crafted title of “sales and business development representative,” or BDR. The first few months are all about telephone prospecting and sending out endless flurries of emails. After a month-long, fast-paced orientation and briefings about Oracle’s products, newcomers settle into pale gray cubicles, clumped together in corridors of 10 to 20 “seats.”

Each morning, these employees don black Plantronics headsets and start prospecting. They aren’t truly selling yet. They’re simply working through long lists of possible sales leads, trying to strike a first spark of interest that’s sufficient to get a real salesperson involved. But it’s worth it for Oracle to pay for this preliminary sorting – and to train future sales stars in the process.

“Rejection is a part of every day,” warns Armando Lopez, an Oracle regional sales manager. He oversees a cluster of BDRs in Austin, and his team focuses on giant companies that have been shunning Oracle products for a long time. These are optimistically known as “national growth accounts” – on the hope that one day, Oracle will grow business with them.

At many companies, such long-shot accounts would be steered to the weakest salespeople, who might give up after an unanswered email or two. Not at Oracle. Lopez’s team includes fast-rising prospects like Texas A&M’s Rowland. After three or four dead ends, Oracle’s wooing is just getting started. BDRs don’t give up until they’ve made as many as 15 attempts.

Hard work? Yes. Lonely? Not at all. Oracle’s cubicle culture lets rookies turn awkward stumbles into a few minutes of giggly or sympathetic banter with friends in nearby seats. Trainers are on hand to help, too – reconstructing tough attempts and offering pointers as fastidiously as if they were college football coaches reviewing game day film. A “horrifying” five-minute call can turn into a 30-minute coaching lesson, Rowland says. The upshot: lots of pointers that might make the next call go better.

Before long, newcomers who might have been playing beer pong in a dorm a few months ago start earning their paychecks. They begin turning cold leads into warm ones, and they discover the persuasive power of sincere phone calls and well-crafted emails. Relative to everything else going on at Oracle, these are tiny wins. In a room full of gray-haired sales veterans, it would seem childish to celebrate. But Class Of is a halfway station between college and grownups’ norms. That means it’s okay to go a little crazy.

Some teams celebrate by ringing a cowbell; others opt for polite applause. Either way, BDRs remember their first wins, months later, with intense clarity. In Austin, 24-year-old Camilla Rosso’s eyes open wide as she tells the story of the first email that worked. When her customer agreed to meet with an Oracle field rep, she recalls, “I thought to myself: Did that really happen! I was kind of in disbelief.” With a proud, awkward smile, she adds: “My team and everyone clapped for me.”

Rosso – a UCLA communications major with a 3.9 grade point average out of a possible 4.0 – has turned out to be an extraordinary addition to Oracle’s lineup. She achieved 324% of her quota in her first quarter with the company, for the second highest showing in a pool of 130 newcomers. The next quarter, she nudged that number up to 331%, winning the top position in her cohort.

During her senior year, Rosso got multiple offers from tech companies wanting her to join their sales teams. These included several that would have kept her in California. When I ask: “Why Oracle?” she opens up a little more each time we revisit the topic.

At first, Rosso sounds as stiff as a shareholders’ letter. “I really like that I’m getting experience selling everything from cloud services to database middleware to servers and storage,” she tells me.

Yet as we keep talking, she mentions a desire to “find a place that was willing to invest and train me.” She hails Class Of as “a really good transition from school to corporate life,” adding, “It’s very easy to make friends.”

Leaving nothing to chance, Oracle starts its Class Of program with a four-week orientation that combines a relentless cram school on enterprise software with delirious bursts of resort-style frolicking. People who show up even a minute late for tech briefings must get on stage and dance to a Pepto-Bismol commercial.

With plenty of extroverts in the room, “it’s embarrassing to dance, but sometimes you almost want to be late, so everyone can see you,” says Caryn Williams, a University of Texas graduate who joined Class Of last year. “By the end of week one of orientation,” the 25-year-old Williams adds, “you knew who your friends were going to be.”

The Class Of program isn’t for everyone. Online reviews of the program include intermittent frustrations with the bonus systems. Echoes of fraternity and sorority culture annoy others. And some departees say that while they liked their time at Oracle, they found faster chances to advance elsewhere.

In the overall tech sales community, however, a stint in Oracle’s sales-training programs is seen as a career accelerator. That’s true for alumni who’ve gone on to high-level positions at companies such as Salesforce (No. 4 on the LinkedIn Top Companies list), Morgan Stanley and Akamai. It’s also true for long-tenured Oracle insiders, whose cubicle-bound beginnings as BDCs have launched them into positions as high as vice president.

Within Oracle, the Class Of program keeps expanding. Construction crews keep streaming onto the Austin facility’s premises, which soon will double its capacity, to 5,000 employees. With Austin servicing the U.S. heartland and Canada, many more seats are needed.

Word of mouth helps Oracle attract the sorts of recent graduates most likely to thrive in the Class Of program. Rosso first heard about the program from older UCLA classmates who were already working at Oracle. Rowland came in via similar connections at Texas A&M. He’s now keeping the cycle going by visiting his old school, 107 miles away in College Station, Texas, and encouraging current students to apply.

“Loyalty has been ingrained in me from pretty much every source since I was a child,” Rowland says. He likes the idea of planning his future at Oracle, and he hopes to be promoted to a field rep’s job in a few years, so he can meet one-on-one with clients. “If you invest a lot in your work, and they give a lot back,” Rowland asks, “then what more could you possibly want?”

“Bringing us in as one big class is an unbelievably good strategy,” Rowland adds. “I can’t believe that every company doesn’t mimic it. Having people surrounding you makes you feel like you’ve got your own little family at the company.”

Last summer, when Rowland arrived at Oracle, he didn’t know anyone in Austin. Now, he says, 90% of the people he knows in town are Oracle colleagues. As Rowland puts it, “You’re kind of given friends.”