When you hear about a company using virtual reality, it’s usually assumed it is for a game or product experience. Many of the big players in Silicon Valley, Silicon Beach, Austin, Seattle, and New York City have some sort of VR presence to wow customers with a larger than life experience.
Now think about how this new technology can better depict company culture — something that’s historically been hard to share with prospective candidates.
For a while now, we’ve been grappling with the question of, “How do you share the Intuit experience without someone actually sitting, working, or walking around campus?” Demonstrating that we have a culture where engineers, designers, and product managers can thrive is a huge selling point when competing for top talent among the tech greats.
Enter VR, and an opportunity for our talent acquisition team to pair the two and create a unique experience for an upcoming Design Career Fair at the University of Washington.
“We heard from many students that they wanted to know more about our design culture” says Gabrielle Woody, one of our university recruiters. “We saw this as a way to show the type of technology we work on while delivering a unique candidate experience at our booth.”
With a turnaround time of about 10 business days, a team of four employees and 1 outside vendor were able to shoot and produce an entirely new way to share Intuit culture and wow candidates. The location showcased the new Mountain View HQ — Building 20 — and cast a variety of diverse design talent within each scene.
“When I heard we were going to use VR to attract design talent, I was for sure in!” said Ashwin Khurana, senior product designer for Mint. “It’s great to see our recruiting team thinking beyond and incorporating emerging technology to attract top talent.”
As the team raced to the finish line and prepared to present to students at University of Washington, it became crystal clear they were onto something very cool and much needed. With every Intuit leader and employee they showed the experience to, there were a lot of smiling, wide eyes, and “This is so cool!” gasps.
The experience was very well received by the students and drove a Net Promoter Score of what started at -60 and grew to +30 as how students saw Intuit as an innovative company to work for. The team is now working on producing a similar experience for Intuit’s Product Management function.
“In the war for talent, we understand that creating engaging, interactive experiences for top talent is important. It’s show versus tell. We’re eager to see how this VR experience impacts our other critical hire functions for Intuit,” said Brett Coin (TA director, who’s speaking about our “candidate engagement journey” at ERE in Minneapolis). “Right now, it’s all about thinking past transactional or relational recruiting; we must approach it with an experiential mindset.”