Usually 24-year-old Taylor Rowland radiates confidence. He’s a recent graduate of Texas A&M, now sharpening his sales skills as a new hire at Oracle. Some of his favorite moments at the big software company come when potential customers try to shoo him away. “I’ll ask them: “Why are you afraid of comparing us to other vendors?” Rowland says, with a grin. He’s learning the art of turning “No” into “Maybe,” and occasionally even into “Yes.”
Yet even a go-getter like Rowland has jitters, and on a recent afternoon he wants to share them. “Everybody leaving college goes into their first job like a kindergartner starting school,” he confides. “What if they don't like me? What if I hate everything about it?”
When he joined Oracle’s Austin, Texas training center last August, “I wasn’t scared about job success,” Rowland says. “I was more like: ‘Am I going to have a friend? Am I going to be a good fit?’”
At many companies, such angst among 20-somethings is an unwelcome headache. Not at Oracle, which ranked No. 3 last year in LinkedIn’s list of the top destinations for recent college graduates. Oracle takes in raw recruits by the thousands, teaches them the fine points of selling -- and nudges the newcomers together in ways that create best friends.
Making the most of the college connection isn’t just a favorite project of Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. It’s also one of the factors that has propelled Oracle to the No. 9 spot on LinkedIn’s list of Top Companies in the U.S. this year, up from No. 26 two years ago.
Let other tech companies woo millennials with the sugar high of endless on-the-job perks. Oracle is betting that camaraderie is more important than climbing walls; that fine-grain feedback matters more than free lunch. After all, Oracle’s legendary sales culture pinpoints customers’ pain points and then shows how the company’s tech offerings can bring relief. Its talent strategy approaches college students’ psyches the same way.
“We understand how important it is to have that first, successful onboarding,” explains Kim Levin, Oracle’s senior organization and talent development consultant. Jumping from college to the workplace can seem scary, she observes. If everyone else at work is older, better-skilled and disinclined to help, being the new kid can be a lonely, demoralizing struggle. That’s especially true for the most ambitious recruits, who feel shattered any time they fall out of step.
In 2013, Oracle began building its antidote, known as the “Class Of” training program. Today, Class Of starts with nonstop recruiting at a core group of 30 large universities. Most are big state schools such as Ohio State and the University of North Carolina; a few are private universities such as Baylor and Georgetown. Oracle then brings several thousand of these recruits to a year of on-the-job training in four hub cities that span the country: Austin, Texas; Burlington, Mass.; Reston, Va.; or Santa Monica, Calif.
Need housing? In Austin, Oracle-owned apartments are just a few minutes away from work. Need feedback? It’s constant. Eager to keep your college spirit alive? You’re encouraged to post a big felt pennant with your school’s name right next to your desk.
If this sounds like the way big U.S. companies welcomed the next generation of talent in the 1960s and 1970s, the answer is: “Yes, it is.” You’ll find lots of modern-day updates at the edges of Oracle’s program, including bite-sized video tutorials and 34-inch curved monitors at everyone’s desks. Fundamentally, though, Oracle is reviving the old-school approach of investing heavily in new hires – and trying to nurture loyalty in return.
Oracle was founded in 1977, which makes it a relatively young company within the Fortune 500 and a veritable grandpa by Silicon Valley’s standards. The Redwood Shores, Calif.
