2019 HPE Houston "Externship" Recruiting Event

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Identifying, acquiring and retaining talent is arguably the most important role of a leader. HPEs future success depends on our ability to obtain and grow the necessary skills needed to compete today and in the future.  As the finance function continues to evolve from transactional to analytical, the skills needed to succeed in this function are becoming more difficult to find.  Similar trends are occurring in the marketing, supply chain, and product management functions.  The ability to draw insightful and relevant conclusions from the vast amount of data at our fingertips is a mandatory skill needed in most of the areas of our business.

Externship participants meeting with with Shelly Anello and Sufy Shahzada.

At the same time, the most talented individuals want to work in a collaborative and dynamic environment where they can best develop their skills and grow in their career.  They are looking for challenging problems to apply what they have learned, and leaders who support them.   A summer internship at HPE is a fantastic avenue for both HPE and students to evaluate each other in a real-world setting.

 Students meeting with Keith Miracle, Kathryn McQueen and Adrian Salinas.

In a unique twist of a traditional summer internship, HPE held a one-day “Externship” event on Friday, January 11th.  The event included 12 top MBA / BBA / MS Analytics students from top schools in Texas (by invitation only) to participate in a short real-world case study competition at HPE’s Houston campus.  The goal was to simulate a “day in the life” at HPE to evaluate how these candidates could solve a challenging quantitative problem in a collaborative, fast-paced, multi-functional environment. 

 Participants tackling the "real world" case study with Ashley Pipkin-jones and Alejandro Hernandez

• Teams were formed with students from different schools, different degrees, different strengths
• Teams were given a large data set and a business problem … and had access to subject matter experts for short burst sessions
• The presentation was 6 minutes long and given on a whiteboard to a multi-functional group of judges

This was an experiment in a different approach to talent acquisition and company cultural assessment.   The feedback from the students has been amazing and our ability to assess these students for future success at HPE was much deeper. We hope to continue and scale this kind of event next year.

We thank all of our leaders who participated in this event:

Event Sponsors – Marc Faulkenbery, Marianne Tansey, and Jay Reyna

Hosts – Raunak Amin, Matt Gardner, Ashley Pipkin Jones, Alejandro Hernandez, Pinky Datwani, Kayla Rietveld, Shelsy Mireles, Alex Pinvises, and Monisha Padur

Subject Matter Experts – Keith Miracle, Kathryn McQueen, Adrian Salinas, Sufyan Shahzada, Shelly Anello, Veronica Aristeguy, Bret Smith, Michael Pratt

Final Presentation Panel – Peter Brown, Carmela Chartrand, Marianne Tansey, Kwame Twumasi, Tom Lattin

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About the writers:

Jay Reyna manages the Finance Leadership Development Program for HPE Finance.  He is a veteran of Finance and has held global roles supporting Information Technology, Corporate Planning, Federal Sales, WW Services, and Enterprise Product Group across companies including HP, Dell, and now HPE. Stay connected to Jay via LinkedIn here. 

Marc Faulkenbery is the VP of Finance for NA Global Accounts with prior leadership roles in WW Volume Servers, HP Cloud, HIT FP&A, and NA HIT Finance.  Marc is on the advisory board of Texas A&M Mays MBA program helped spearhead talent acquisition for HPE for over 10 years. Stay connected to Marc here. 

To learn more about career opportunities in Finance, explore our Career Page.