All Things Must Come to an End

As you can probably tell by the title, today is the last day of my Equity Trust Internship. It is very bittersweet and I cannot believe that the summer has gone by so fast. I remember my first day here, completely overwhelmed when my mentor gave me three large projects to work on. I didn’t think I could do it. But if there’s one thing that this experience has taught me, it is that I can do anything I put my mind to. Whether its learning about Windows Movie Maker, presenting in front of our CEO, or completing all three of those projects on time, I know that I can accomplish anything by working hard and pushing myself to succeed.

For this last blog, all I want to say is that this is a great internship for anyone looking to gain real-life experience at a company that will treat you like a person and friend, and not just an intern. All of the interns were given tasks and projects specific to our education, allowing each of us to gain a foundation for our future career. If you are a person that wants to challenge yourself and learn a lot about a company, the world of business, and your field of study, Equity Trust is the place for you.

Hopefully you have gotten to see the types of projects we have all been working on and use this as a guide for the potential work you may be doing as a future intern here. The best of luck to everyone, and make sure to follow Equity Trust Careers on Facebook and Twitter ;)

Office Leadership with a "Get it Done" Attitude

Do you know what the five most important global leadership traits are? If you don’t, here they are: 1) Performance 2) Character 3) Persistence 4) Adaptability 5) Flexibility. If you attended Equity Trust Company’s summer intern training presentation, you would had been able to name off all of those traits, because all of the interns just delivered training to the entire company for the past two days. It was a really exciting opportunity for us. I mean, how many college students can say that they delivered training to an entire professional organization? Probably not many. It was just another great experience for all of the interns and something we’re all really going to realize the value of later on in our education and in our future work experiences.

To tell you a little bit about it…our project was called “Setting the PACE.” PACE stands for People Achieving Common Excellence. To achieve common excellence in the workplace, there must be knowledge, accountability, communication, leadership, and teamwork. Each of us touched upon a different subject; my subject was leadership. I trained the employees on the most important leadership traits in today’s global economy, how to go about developing those traits, ways to demonstrate leadership in the workplace, and what Equity Trust managers/supervisors think about leadership at ETC.

Although we were really tired of hearing ourselves talk after delivering this presentation over seven times, it was actually kind of fun. We’ve heard good feedback from the employees about the presentation, and that always makes you feel good. So to give you a little taste of our presentation, here’s a link to one of the videos we showed during the presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRkiouh5NEI

Enjoy!

You Know You're in HR When...

This is now week four for me, and I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of things. When the Recruiter asks me to do a reference check on someone, it’s no problem! And on the plus side, I found out that I really do like doing Human Resources work…listening in on phone interviews, doing reference checks, reviewing resumes, etc. And it’s pretty nice to find that out since I’ll probably be doing it for the rest of my life…well, at least for the next 5 years I’m guessing. And you definitely know you’re in HR when the other interns start coming to you about the company dress code and when they give you a hard time about the blogging and social networking policies you write. Oh well…all part of the world of HR!

As for my projects, this week has been almost entirely focused on the new applicant tracking system that Equity Trust will put into place next month. It’s a great system that’s really going to help the recruiting process by consolidating all the candidate, requisition, and user information in one place. However, like any new system, it’s definitely got some kinks. And I’m the one who’s assigned to figure them out, which is pretty exciting. Like I mentioned before, the staff here at Equity Trust really does trust you to be a problem solver and help the company. As long as the tech people from this certain company call me back, we’re good to go. If not…someone is definitely going to be leaving a lot of messages on their phone lines. Respectful, professional messages…but still.

To keep me busy while waiting for the company to call back, the HR team and I are sitting in on 3-4 hour training sessions on the system. It can get long, but here and there I find some really helpful information about the system. We’ve also started to upload resumes into the system and although it doesn’t sound that exciting, it’s a recruiter’s dream come true. And if you’re worried about the earth, be happy, because this computerized system is going to be saving some trees too.

On another note, once again Equity Trust is putting on another fun event for the intern and leadership trainees tonight. This time, we’re going to enjoy a happy hour with the Leadership team at Champ’s bar and grill. Although I won’t be partaking in the “happy” part of happy hour, I’m still looking forward to networking with the leaders and a nice, refreshing Diet Coke (or maybe a virgin piña colada….I haven’t decided yet).

The Start of Something New

It's already the beginning of my third week here at Equity Trust, and I can’t believe how quickly time flies! This is going to be the first post about the internship experience at Equity Trust Company, and I’m so excited to get it up and going. This blog is actually a part of my project, so bear with me as the other interns and I figure out all the secrets to blogging. To quickly introduce myself, I'm Lauren Romance, the HR intern here at Equity Trust. To put something worthwhile in this blog post, here’s the blog I wrote last week to sum up my past two weeks:

“So it’s the end of my second week here at Equity Trust. On Wednesday, our CEO, Vice President, and Director of HR took us all out to lunch at the Elyria Country Club. It was a really great opportunity to ask them about their jobs, how they got to where they were, and their advice for us. Not every company gives you the chance to chat with the CEO about his college days and where all the Vice President has traveled in his work career. The best part was, yes, the delicious lunch, and the fact that they were all great people who were really interested in what we were doing.

Besides going out to lunch with the executives, I’m working on my three large projects for the summer: enhancing the Equity Trust career site, learning about and writing a manual for Taleo – the new applicant tracking system, and creating Facebook/Twitter career pages to use in the future as a recruiting tool. It’s a lot on my plate now, but Equity Trust is a really supportive environment. Our webmaster has already met with Ryan, the marketing intern, and me about Facebook and Twitter and showed us a lot of great info about how the company uses those sites already.

The one thing that’s truly great about working as the HR intern here is that my effort and work is really valued in the company. I meet with my supervisor a great deal and update her all the time with what I’m doing for the project. Also, I get to see how some of the functional, day-to-day HR work is done. In the past two weeks, I’ve reviewed resumes, done reference calls, and helped enter in payroll information for newly acquired employees.

Another thing everyone should know is that Equity Trust is notorious for the fun activities it puts on for all its employees. Tonight we all get to go to the Indian’s game. Although our team isn’t doing so hot right now, we’re going to have an Equity Trust dinner on the house, meet Slider, and get free tickets to the game! And we get out of work at 4:30 today to get ready….very nice.”