Job Shadowing & Superpowers with Intern Aaron

I have learned a lot in the first few weeks of my internship here at the State Personnel Department.  With the amount of time I have been given to job shadow many different members of the various functions of human resources that are performed here at the SPD, I have been able to gain a good understanding of just what each department does.  Job shadowing is not all that I do here though.  I have been given many hands-on tasks to perform along with several projects to work on and complete.

Aaron uses his new-found intern
superpowers to hold up the JW Mariott! 

Job shadowing is a great learning experience for anyone new to a position.  It is especially helpful here.  I know on my first few days here I would walk past the different departments and think to myself “What do they do there?”  After finishing up with job shadowing, however, I can walk past and know what is going on. I have been given the opportunity to job shadow with the talent acquisition, compensation, benefits, and employee relations divisions.  While job shadowing benefits I got to meet their fish, Benefish.

Job shadowing the talent acquisition division was very helpful when I began to be assigned tasks to work on.  While there, I was shown how to perform background checks and verify employment.  These are the type of tasks I have been asked to perform, and seeing them done firsthand gave me the insight needed to complete the tasks on my own.

With talent acquisition, I have been working on projects.  These projects on have been rewarding and have taught me the ability to prioritize projects and multitask.  There have been six major projects to work on, one of which is the YouTube Intern Video. In the video, Nicole (another SPD intern) and I have been going around and filming some clips of information and perks of being an intern here at the State Personnel Department.  We have done many things, ranging from filming outside at the canal to taking some goofy pictures, including a Leaning Tower of Pisa-like shot of me holding up the JW Marriott.  Other projects have included making an interview question guide for hiring managers.  The goal of this is for the hiring manager to find the questions they want, and a set of interview questions can be assembled for them.  A similar project is the eScreen guide we have put together.  The eScreen guide holds all the questions used in the applicant screening phase of hiring.  There is also a Nursing Portal project.  Since nursing is a hard to fill position for the State, we are helping to make it easier for the nurses to find the jobs in our job bank.  The other projects are a recruiting toolkit and a social media strategy guide.  The recruitment toolkit is going to put all of the information that hiring managers need in one location, giving them access to the hiring process and any tools that they may need in that process such as quick step guides or the eScreen library that we have put together.  The social media strategy guide is going to give SPD Talent Acquisition a plan of action on how to improve their social media platforms in order to gain more viewers for what is put on the social media sites.

I have enjoyed my time here at the State Personnel Department working on the tasks and projects assigned to me as well as learning what the different divisions around here do.  I am looking forward to the experience the next few months hold for me in rotating around various different agencies, beginning next week with the Department of Natural Resources, before returning here for one last week before the end of my internship.