Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Intern Haley Assists with the Indiana Veterans' Home Career Fair

It has been a whirlwind of a month interning with the Indiana State Personnel Department (SPD) at the Indiana Veteran’s Home (IVH). Over the past five weeks, I have learned a lot about Talent Acquisition, and the real man power it takes to run a large facility. IVH is a 24 hour facility, so between nursing, recreation, food service and administration staff there is a constant need for good, dedicated workers to help maintain the facility and more importantly the residents’ experience. So to help IVH maintain their five star rating, we hosted a Job Fair on campus June 9, 2015.

This was a great project for me to get to work on. The event consisted of information we would provide prospective candidates, décor of the venue, advertising, and coordination of technological and in person aspects of the application process. The event posed quite the challenge, which left me very busy.

I helped coordinate social media advertising, and I assisted Tamara Smith, the IVH Marketing and Admission Director, with the Exponent’s Twitter campaign. I also created brochures and PowerPoint presentations to educate the job fair participants about the Indiana Veterans’ Home as well as the job openings, with compensation and benefits being a large part of that information. When it comes to state employment, one can see why the state government is the 3rd largest employer in the state; the holidays, insurance, generous time accrual, and work/life balance makes the State of Indiana a great place to work!

We coordinated the event at the Veterans’ Home with our talent acquisition team in Indianapolis, and got to see some people from my first day in Indianapolis during orientation. The team of about 10 worked with applicants the whole day of the job fair and it was a total success. We had 105 attendees during the 8 hours we had it running. So we are busy working on background checks and employment verifications, TB testing, etc to get everyone selected hired! I also provided some very exciting analysis with staff’s experience and pay equity. I have also taken two trips to Indy since my last blog. An exciting part of the Governor’s internship is the Speaker Series. Last week I saw Denny Darrow the Chief of Staff for the Indiana State Personnel Dept talk about the “Invest in Your Health” initiative here in Indiana, and the Director of Tourism, Mark Newman. It was great to meet these leaders!

Back at IVH we are hiring and evaluating applicants. We have found some very passionate people that want to help Veterans and give back to our heroes. I find everyone at IVH feels driven by the residents. The residents venture around the building so we have quite a few that come visit us in the office. They have great stories and like to make us laugh; all of my coworkers are definitely proud to work for them. It is very inspiring to be part of the facility, IVH’s slogan is the Veterans’ Affairs slogan; “Serving those who Served.”

I am very excited about the projects here at the Indiana Veteran’s Home and I also really enjoy the people I have met. The culture they have created here helps me look at the candidates we have and find the ones with the same genuine values that will help them serve our veterans. 



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