No excuses: John Heim on CSC’s bold vision for college recruiting

For federal contractors, it’s a delicate balance: Bringing in the next generation of talent, while still complying with federal contracting requirements that specify a minimum number of years’ experience to perform on a contract.

Nearly three years ago, CSC North American Public Sector President Jim Sheaffer responded with a call to action all his own: It was time, he told HR leaders at the Falls Church, Va.-based IT and business services company, to bring a robust college recruiting program to the table.

This would be a bold new step. Over the past few years the company had been recruiting a modest 25 to 50 college hires a year. Still, Sheaffer was undaunted, and soon enough, so were senior HR leaders within the public sector. Including John Heim.

Heim recalls that moment.

“Jim said, Let’s take the excuses off the table and bring them in. This is an untapped resource that we haven’t taken advantage of.” That was a “compelling argument,” says Heim. “It resonated and helped us move forward.”

And move forward the company has. Within the last two years alone, CSC has brought in roughly 575 new college recruits to the company’s North American Public Sector. In addition, the HR team has overseen 260 summer internships among sophomore and junior-level students. The NPS college recruitment program also participates in recruitment activities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including Morgan State University, Howard University, Hampton University, Norfolk State University, Virginia Union University, and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

Talent: More intentional approach

For Heim, Sheaffer’s call to action coincided with a key new chapter in his own work as an HR professional. At the time, Heim had about 20 years of experience already under his belt at CSC: half on the commercial side, the other on the US federal government business side. Then, in the fall of 2007, Heim was tapped Defense Group Vice President of Human Resources for the company. (Heim is one of six client-facing HR executives within NPS as a whole.)

Heim and the rest of the HR team got to work. Top of the list was helping to deliver on talent recruitment. A formalized HR plan, which clearly aligned with NPS business objectives, soon followed. “It’s not to say we weren’t focused on those business objectives previously,” says Heim, “but having that formal documented business plan made us more intentional about considering the value that we bring into the business.”

One of the results, he adds, was a more collaborative team. “We recognize that we need to work together as one HR organization in how we address priorities,” says Heim. “We go back and continually review the plan … to drive our HR service delivery capabilities at the higher level.”

That process of continual review extends to CSC’s college recruitment program.

Heim and other HR leaders at CSC North American Public Sector routinely identify additional talent areas that could benefit the company’s mission and the schools that can help fill the need.

“We tie that back to anticipated requirements and then move forward with enhancements to the overall program, based on the plan” says Heim.

Real work experience

A top draw of CSC’s college recruiting program is its emphasis on real work.

“One of the key elements is to get them [recruits] engaged in real work, anything related to our IT service capability, for example, and our large enterprise resource planning activity,” says Heim.

Recruitment also happens at the local level, near customer sites.

Case in point: When a US Air Force base in Ohio needed specialized IT workers, CSC looked to students at nearby Wright State University as an untapped resource. “We found this school out in Ohio that we were able to partner with and provide onsite training with Oracle as part of an 18-month apprenticeship program,” says Heim. “We got them trained, then put them to work support our Air Force client.”

The approach has offered long-term sustainability.

“Had we not had the foresight to engage in this strategy, we would have been stuck with our traditional ways of thinking … looking at a mid-level resource that we might have had to relocate from somewhere else,” says John Heim.

“This strategy enabled us to keep it all local … it was beneficial to the company and to our clients, because we could offer long-term sustainable activity where individuals were already embedded in the environment.”

Talent development: What’s ahead

Success in talent recruiting is never static. It requires thinking ahead. Heim is doing just that.

“It’s one thing to bring new college hires into the organization but if we don’t keep them actively engaged, and provide additional care and feeding, our ability to retain them might wane in the next two to three years,” he says.

That active engagement comes through efforts like BRIDGE (Building Relationships Integral to Developing Group Excellence). A six-month program, BRIDGE pairs a new college hire with an employee who has been with the company two to three years.

“The whole idea behind BRIDGE is to leverage experience, and build a connection with, someone who has been with CSC for a couple years,” says Heim. “CSC is a complex organization,” he adds, “and we like to provide some real-time activity and interaction to help the transition within CSC.”

Those steps speak to the overall vision that Sheaffer outlined three years ago, and, which Heim and other HR leaders continue to deliver upon.

Count on CSC, says Heim, to increase its capacity to add talent through one overall focus: Taking the excuses off the table. And leading with a vision-first approach.

Posted by Lisa Singh on Monday, July 26th, 2010. Filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry