Quicken Loans and its family of companies are gearing up for another big internship push this summer that could bring as many as 1,000 young people into the fold of the downtown Detroit-based firm.
The mortgage origination firm brought in excess of 500 interns last summer and a total of 750 for the entire year. This year, the goal is 1,000 for 2013 with the bulk of them (700-800) set to come in during the summer. The internships will be primarily for Quicken Loans proper, but other firms in the Quicken Loans family of companies, such as
FatHead and
One Reverse Mortgage, will also draw from the Quicken Loans internship talent pool.
"It's a tremendous value," says Michelle Salvatore, director of recruiting for
Quicken Loans. "It's helping us with our candidate pool. We can engage with them and train them. It's really been our biggest candidate source."
Many of those internships turn into jobs. Salvatore says the company turned 78 percent of the interns who weren't returning to school into new employees. Quicken Loans currently employs several thousand and regularly has dozens of new jobs up for grabs at any one time. A vast majority of those employees and interns are based in downtown Detroit.
Quicken Loans interns are not only introduced to the company's go-getter culture but also the greater downtown area. Quicken Loans does at least six events that introduce the interns to the city each summer, such as outings to Tigers games and the
Detroit Institute of Arts.
"We try to show them a lot of the city while they are here," Salvatore says. "A true urban core is what we try to expose them to."
Source: Michelle Salvatore, director of recruiting for Quicken Loans
Writer: Jon Zemke
Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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