Keionna Bailey, Account Coordinator

Internships and SDGs

Keionna is an account coordinator. She joined our team full-time in Spring 2020, following an internship the previous fall. Here, she reflects on her internship experience.

In my last year of college, I had nearly exhausted every platform looking for an internship that felt right. A family friend sent some information about Bullhorn, and I said: who names a company Bullhorn? (Sorry, Brad.) At this point, I had been looking for months. And I was impressed with the way they talked about themselves and their work online. So I reached out. After meeting some of the team, it was clear that their language about purpose, impact, and values was genuine. And the people were pretty great, too.

So I completed a semester-long internship in account management. I was finishing a degree in communication, and although I hadn’t known this was a job available, it was a perfect fit. Bullhorn saw a talent in me, and I was excited to explore that with them. So at the end of my internship, when Bullhorn extended an offer to come back post-grad full-time, I accepted.

But I don’t want just to leave you with a dazzling review. We’ve got some work to do. Our internship program is flexible. Which is great. It also poses some challenges.

Internships are a reliable pipeline for talent. Four of our current full-time employees started as interns. So it’s important that we apply the same care and attention to full-time applicants as to intern applicants. One of our SDG focuses is quality education. We tend to think about this goal in terms of our clients and how we plug into our community. But, at its core, internships are opportunities for educational impact, too.

We believe in paying our interns, which opens the opportunity to folks who can’t afford to do free work. And our internship is undoubtedly hard work. But another part of the equation, the part we are still working on, is strategically connecting with educational organizations to broaden our applicant pool. There are talented students who don’t know that branding is a career field available to them. Students like me.

As our team grows, we need to be looking for talent with a fresh perspective. Connecting with new schools and education programs will broaden the types of students entering into our internship program and build a more diverse, skilled, impactful full-time team in the future.