The following post was authored by Seton Goddard, one of our interns from this summer who worked on the Strategic Partnerships/Members Services teams.
For the last nine weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to work as intern at DirectEmployers Association on the northwest side of Indianapolis. DirectEmployers Association offers an offshoot of the first online job boards, which eventually led to websites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. Their primary website, US.jobs, is a central component to the work they do with over 120,000 employers around the world. DirectEmployers (DE) uses various forms of technology to syndicate all of these employers’ jobs to hundreds of other websites, where job seekers can easily access them. DE has also maximized the opportunities provided by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by closely analyzing the numbers of jobs to which job seekers are led when their search begins by utilizing a search engine like Google or Bing. Because it has been found that the overwhelming majority of job seekers use search engines rather than CareerBuilder or Monster to find jobs, the use of SEO has led to a lot of success for major corporations around the world in the area of human resources.
My role this summer has involved working primarily in the areas of Member Services, Strategic Partnerships, and quality assurance. Even though DE works with thousands of employers, the majority of the work we do is done with companies who pay to become members of our association. When corporations become members, they’re provided with a plethora of services, which is where Member Services and quality assurance comes into play. Throughout the summer, I’ve had the opportunity to make sure that our members are getting the most for their money by performing regular audits and correcting errors along the way.
As someone who is interested in healthcare, this has been great experience. In addition to seeing all of the work that DE does with healthcare providers and organizations, it’s also given me a lot of insight into hiring processes, and even the significant value in outcomes research, which is meaningful in all areas of work. I was also given the task of working with a fellow intern to coordinate a weeklong career development program for underserved students in the Indianapolis area. This has been a pleasure, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the work I’ve done with it. The program, which is taking place this week, has been very successful, and those of us who have worked with the students know that this is making a big difference in their outlook on their futures. Working at DirectEmployers has also afforded me the opportunity to put many of my Wabash-gained skills into practice in the real world. Having the ability to write well and communicate well has benefitted me immensely, and my colleagues and supervisors have taken notice.
On that note, I would like to thank the Lilly Endowment and DirectEmployers Association for funding this internship, as well as Betsy Knott and Seth Flater ’10 who worked together to provide me with this internship. Additionally, I owe a huge “thank you” to Pat, Mattie, Emily, Nick ‘15, Erin, and Noah Boyce (along with the rest of the Indianapolis area Boyce/Birch families) for putting up with me while they hosted me at their home in Indianapolis this summer.
