Virtual Internship - How FICO owned the curveball

Most of the things we talk about today, as an organization, edged being unthinkable a few years back.?

Growing business landscape means staying ahead of the curve by outpacing change. That means having the talent that will help you do that.

For FICO, growth has been about bringing the right people at the right time. Our internship program in India has integrated with the structure so intricately that it is hard to imagine FICO today without one.

In 2019, I lugged over 500 printed question sheets and flew thousand miles to assist the core team to conduct the offline test in one of the largest campus for FICO. With a warm welcome at noon, we started the test and by evening, I was in my hotel room, manually checking 500 answer papers. As I neared completion of the first shortlist, it was already dawn and I was exhausted.

Fast forward 1 year, the pandemic was at the peak and FICO was in the middle of a transition. As an organization, moving to a platform-first strategy has been one of the key focus areas over the past year. While the world slowed down in 2020, we prepped to hire the largest batch of interns for FICO.

Since travel had to be cut down to 0, the move to going digital was daunting. As we were already working with CodeSignal for our lateral tech hires, the readiness helped us save a lot of time and money that would have otherwise resulted in lengthy negotiation periods.

In our first test that we administered to a batch of 1000, the testing infrastructure failed even before the test began.

In that moment, when our inbox was being bombarded by emails, we could sense the anticipation of the students to be a part of the process. We couldn't let this take a hit on our employer brand. We immediately cancelled the test and sent out a note to all the students assuring that we will reschedule this at the earliest.

We connected with the CodeSignal leadership to quickly analyze the shortcomings and worked pretty much overnight to get a good foundation going. You see, what many misses out, at least in India campus hiring scenario, is that if your organization misses a day or two in between the placement days of a college, you’re likely to lose 20-30% of good talent. Once CodeSignal was up and running again, we were on track to bring the finest of talents.

Over the course of 4 months, we hired over 200 interns and in the next 6 months, we onboarded them.

In conclusion, if I were to give you some personal takeaways from this story, here are few –

1.?Stick out your head for anything new that excites you in the organization and experiment

2.?If you have taken up a new responsibility, take as much help and guidance as you can to not only perform but excel. Asking for help only makes you a better individual because you get to learn from so many experiences

3.?Whilst being new, add value from Day 1. Find your space in that group and be accountable and be present. Taking up a new responsibility also shouldn’t be an excuse to lack in any other activity / role you are involved in

4.?You alone can’t do it. We oftentimes feel that we can conquer the whole world alone but that can’t be any further from the truth. You only succeed because someone gave you a hand at the right time. We are social beings and there is nothing more uplifting than winning as a team

5.?One can have all the tools and minds in the world, but it is only the correct execution that will make or break the situation. Even though FICO had been using CodeSignal since a while, switching the online testing platform to 1000 students at one go, was overwhelming. But once we were able to work out the logistics together, we could administer the test to even larger batches without glitches

6.?No matter how big the task, have fun. There were days when the administrative tasks of onboarding 200 interns was too much for a day, but the campus team always knew how to laugh about it, which included our VP HR. The load didn’t actually reduce, but it was much lighter this time around

7. It is imperative that one responds in a situation of crisis and responds quick. That helps restore the faith in you, as a brand, who place customer experience above all

?And with that, I can say that being on the core team of leading the campus hiring efforts, created avenues of learning with every interaction I had with multiple stakeholders involved in the process. It wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without the continuous efforts of so many of my colleagues across geographies and across teams who were involved in this.

And as a parting note to our interns, most of whom are now full time employees at FICO, good luck with all that you do here and beyond.

Do check out our page if you want to know all about the open opportunities at www.fico.com/careers

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