Three things I look for in new hires
Steve Howe
Retired Chairman and Managing Partner Ernst & Young LLP. Board member Royal Caribbean and Lazard Inc.
I get a thrill meeting EY’s youngest professionals, listening to their ideas and imagining how their talent and enthusiasm will continue to evolve and strengthen our culture for decades to come. Recently, I spoke at our annual International Intern Leadership Conference in Orlando. During this incredible event, we brought together 3,600 high-potential interns from EY member firms around the world.
In this room full of future leaders, the energy was palpable, and I challenged everyone to think how they would add to our unique culture — the very culture that makes them want to work here. What contribution — even bigger than professional excellence — would they make as future stewards of this culture? I would ask the same question to the most senior-level experienced candidates, as well.
And that’s no small challenge. This month, EY in the US was named to Consulting Magazine’s Best Firms to Work For list for the second year in a row and was ranked on the top 10 of Working Mother Best Companies list for the tenth consecutive year – largely because of our culture. In fact, EY is consistently ranked one of the top organizations for culture — one reason I’ve been proud to spend the last 32 years with the firm.
Over the years, I’ve seen EY grow exponentially — our firms now have 212,000 people in more than 150 countries and reported nearly $29 billion in revenue globally last year. Amid that growth, we’ve had to sustain our powerful culture. To do that, we look for people who align with how we think about three things: purpose, values and questions.
Purpose
At EY, we realize that doing business for the sake of doing business is not enough. So we have revolutionized our way of doing business. We already had the what and how of our business: helping our clients achieve their business objectives by solving their complex challenges. But now we are also laser-focused on the why. At EY, our purpose is to build a better working world — for our clients, ourselves and our communities. Our purpose drives every business decision.
Identifying our core purpose revolutionized our own business, and — through our new business approach, Purpose-Led Transformation — we try to help clients catalyze that same change.
For those looking to join the EY team, we want to know your purpose. What motivates you to succeed? What are you most passionate about? What unique purpose can you bring to EY, and why choose EY as the vehicle for realizing that purpose?
Values
Internally, we strive to recognize our employees for their success. Our global awards program, Better begins with you, enables our people to recognize and celebrate individuals and teams who consistently live our values and bring our purpose of building a better working world to life through their everyday behavior. Even more importantly, we strive to foster an environment of diverse perspectives, which means being very intentional about hiring people who bring differing experiences from their backgrounds, education, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality, generation, working and thinking styles, abilities and technical skills. The richness of these diverse perspectives can lead to a wealth of creativity and new styles of thinking and interacting. This, in turn, makes an impact on our clients, people and communities.
This approach starts at the beginning. Throughout our hiring and onboarding process, we look for people who demonstrate integrity, respect and teaming. Only as a seamlessly working team can we effect change. We want people with energy, enthusiasm and the courage to lead. And as client-facing professionals, we look for people who build relationships based on doing the right thing.
Questions
To realize our purpose of a better working world, we start by asking challenging questions. These are the big questions across the working world right now. We want to spark innovative thought, new conversations and great opportunities. At EY, we want to redefine what is possible, so we ask better questions to achieve better answers — and the better the answers, the better the world works.
To continue this innovative thinking, we need more questioners. Our efforts to preserve EY’s winning culture do not mean we’re looking for cookie-cutter colleagues. We want to actively and aggressively combat stagnation. And to do that, we need new minds — tastemakers and visionaries. We need young professionals willing to challenge the status quo and think differently about our and our clients’ problems. So ask questions, play devil’s advocate start a healthy debate. Only with the onboarding of clever innovators can EY continue to grow.
That’s #howIhire.
It was great to meet these future leaders at our annual International Intern Leadership Conference in Orlando. The event brought together 3,600 high-potential interns from 24 countries around the world.
About the author: Steve Howe is the Americas Managing Partner and Chairman and Managing Partner of Ernst & Young LLP, the EY firm in the US. He has been honored by the National Association of Corporate Directors as a Directorship 100 honoree (2014 and 2015), recognizing him as one of the most influential leaders in the boardroom and corporate governance community. Accounting Today also named Steve to their “Top 100 Most Influential People” 2014 and 2015 lists of the thought leaders and visionaries who are shaping the accounting profession. In addition, Steve was recognized as one of the top “100 CEO Leaders in STEM” by STEMconnector.
You can follow him on Twitter: @SteveHoweEY
Open to Strategic/Shared Value Leadership
9 年Thankyou! I was already thrilled to find the Beacon′s back-up to support my advocating purpose as being the grounding that spruces excellence, passion and so forth, the “glue” that unites, focuses and sees all thru turbulence. Till then I′d felt alone, resorting to no more than my own experience to this effect to provide mentees with a framework whilst most HR folks insisted passion rest at the core of self-motivation and performance. As a line rep, to me it had but a sight-sighted, firework-like effect and I′d noticed since schooldays that once people realized the “why” and bought that in, they′d simply enjoy what they did and that fueled passion and consequent outcomes. Now, you offer extra b-up thru this article. I couldn′t get over what I once heard fm a top hh: that only 10% of companies truly wanted intra-preneurs whilst on the other hand, so much was published about the value of asking questions, of thinking out of the box, on how badly all needed innovation and how sustainability was about seeing to the mid and long-term and so forth. Incoherent and inconsistent messages like that did not serve upcoming markets and talents that valued legitimacy and not surprisingly youngsters that could afford to, did not want to join or remain engaged in that kind of working environment. I′m now going to add yr endorsement to one of the many examples I use to illustrate the value that rests in questioning not for the sake of defying the status quo as many believe intra-preneurs do as if rebels of some kind but rather out of genuine big picture curiosity: Natura (an EY customer) in Brazil has set yet another shared value benchmark in both fronts EY herein advocates. Since they are purpose-driven (they nurture well-being as opposed to merely selling cosmetics and thus serve all stakeholders) they asked what′s most precious in a tree, it′s wood, sap, leaves or seeds? Not only they found innovation in the threatened Ucuuba tree but coined an entirely new mindset as to how the status quo perceived (and thus treated) the tree′s value (henceforth seeds being the “jewel”), setting new sustainable development practices, etc. All started with asking a genuine “why-like” question instead of just further investigating and eventually adopting, traditional forest people practices. This is the kind of example that makes tremendous sense that, by the way, ensures we shall have “a better working world” indeed.
Audit Partner at EY Malaysia
9 年Noted when conducting future interviews :)
Global Client Service Partner at EY
9 年Global culture - lets share with our teams in APAC David John Albert Tong Maria Espinal Jung Wei Toh Janice Chan #betterworkingworld
power electronics
9 年nice "PC" picture....
Non Executive Advisory Board Chairman at Keebeck Wealth Management
9 年An excellent, thoughtful and motivational perspective which will continue to help the firm attract and retain the professionals that will shape and guide us and our clients through a constantly changing future.