How EDS recruits tomorrow's finance leaders.

• Author: Roshto, Glenn
• Position: Includes related article on top-down recruitment

September marks the start of another school year. Your company's recruiters are scouring college campuses for the cream of the crop in finance and business. Learn how EDS hires top-notch people, even when it often does not offer the highest salary.

CASE STUDY

EDS employee George Larrazabal spent seven months traveling between Caracas, Venezuela, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he conducted currency impact analyses and supported a $40-million contract negotiation. Then he returned to company headquarters in Plano, Tex., to create a comparative analysis of EDS and its competitors - a tool that is now part of EDS' response to proposal requests.

Well, every organization has its stars, right? The fact is, this example is from the employee's first year-and-a-half at EDS, an information services company with more than $14 billion in annual revenue and more than 90,000 employees worldwide. Our ability to hire such achievers cannot be credited to a huge recruiting organization, a global blitzkrieg of campuses or an open checkbook. Like most corporations today, we have to recruit our next financial leaders in the real world of limited resources and seemingly unlimited competition.

EDS has had a structured recruiting process for finance and accounting professionals for more than a dozen years. In the mid 1980s we brought in as many as 150 new grads a year. Today we need fewer new financial professionals, but we need them to be business consultants more than "bean counters." Since we are unencumbered by the expensive campus extravaganzas and inflated salary offers that work for some companies, we have had to develop a candidate counter-offensive that works for us - and might help you, too.

PHASE 1: THE OUTREACH

Leave no stone unturned. We will consider any resume we receive, and we are open to graduates from any school, because great people can come from anywhere. We take all referrals very seriously, whether from schools or executives. We attend gatherings of academic and business clubs, as well as forums like MBA consortiums. We have also added a dedicated EDS financial recruiting function to the company's Internet Web site at www.eds.com.

Consider nontraditional candidates. EDS requires finance candidates to have a minimum of 18 credit semester hours in accounting or finance, but their degrees do not have to be in accounting or finance. In fact, we look for unusual people and have hired some with liberal arts or language undergraduate degrees. These...