Cisco extends a warm welcome to new employees, starting with the recruiting process and extending to programs for new hires and employees of acquired companies. We want employees to experience the best that Cisco has to offer, beginning on their very first day.
Casting a Wide Net
Diversity, the collective mix of who we are as individuals, is central to Cisco’s culture and way of doing business. We actively seek to hire people of diverse backgrounds, cultures, skills, and points of view because we firmly believe that a more inclusive workforce positions our company to:
- Anticipate important changes in world markets
- Respond to a wide spectrum of customer needs
- Tap rich sources of technical and business innovation
- Build a solid foundation for the future
We sharpened our recruiting focus in 2008 by adding a dedicated diversity recruiting oversight manager and developing a comprehensive global strategy for diversity recruitment. This strategy focuses on broadening our reach, identifying and targeting untapped resources, and increasing the diversity of the candidate pool for executive, professional, and university hires.
To improve our candidate hiring experience, in February 2008 Cisco began administering online surveys to hiring managers and external job candidates. The surveys, which will be conducted each quarter, help identify opportunities to improve our hiring processes. The survey data assesses the quality of interactions between the staffing organization, hiring managers, candidates, and new hires.
Making Sure New Engineers Find a Good Fit
Cisco Choice, one of the most distinctive recruiting programs in the IT industry, is designed to attract top engineers from select U.S. universities. All new graduates who receive an offer to join the Cisco Choice program participate in the selection of their workgroups and managers. They attend a three-week orientation and placement program, where they meet managers from different technology groups to get an impression of their management styles and plans. An open-house event provides additional time for the engineers to meet with prospective managers. A Cisco Choice wiki is also available for information sharing. After the orientation, the new hires indicate their preferences for particular groups and managers, then are integrated into an organization through mentor programs and networking events. During FY08, Cisco hired 500 graduates through the program.
Cisco uses many channels to identify and recruit top talent, looking not only for strong skill sets but also for unique perspectives and cultural experiences. We partner with a variety of technical, professional, and community organizations, among them the National Society of Black Engineers, the Society of Women Engineers, the National Society of Hispanic Engineers, the Chinese Institute of Engineers, the National Society of Black MBAs, the National Society of Hispanic MBAs, and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. Cisco is also involved in a number of military and veterans hiring programs.
Cisco has a strong community of employee resource groups representing the diverse cultures and interests of our workforce. These groups are active both inside and outside the company through mentor programs, community outreach, recruiting, and social networking. By valuing the differences that make each person unique, we are able to increase individual and team performance, productivity, and satisfaction. We also encourage managers and employees to actively engage with culturally rich organizations that allow them to grow personally and professionally, while also broadening Cisco’s network of talented employees.
Web-Based Recruiting and Hiring
Web 2.0 technologies have opened new avenues for Cisco’s recruiting, interviewing, and orientation activities while also avoiding the time, expense, and carbon emissions involved in travel. For college recruits, we conduct on-campus virtual information sessions during which potential hires hear a presentation by a Cisco executive and then go to a virtual room to meet with a manager from a specific business unit. For executive candidates, we host interviews using Cisco TelePresence technology. Since January 2008, about 40 candidates for executive positions have participated in approximately 250 Cisco TelePresence interviews. Each candidate took part in interviews with several Cisco executives remotely, simplifying and shortening the hiring process without requiring the participants to take significant time off from work.
Cisco even recruits in cyberspace. To attract the next generation of collaboration technology workers, Cisco has a recruiting presence in Second Life, the web-based virtual world provided by Linden Lab. In this three-dimensional virtual environment, Cisco “avatars” host technical talks, resume-writing seminars, and question-and-answer sessions with Cisco executives. On November 6, 2007, Cisco conducted a Channel Partner Career Fair on Second Life, with four partners participating.
Visit Cisco on Second Life at:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cisco%20Systems%204/133/123/25
Watch a recruiting video recorded in Second Life at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5pooP3G8vg 
Bringing Sales Talent to the Marketplace
The Cisco Sales Associate Program is a worldwide graduate recruitment program designed to infuse the field sales organization with early-in-career, diverse talent whose vitality, skills, and creative thinking fuel productivity and strengthen Cisco’s long-term competitive advantage. Associate education is a blend of classroom instruction, hands-on lab exercises, self-study, and on-the-job training that offers participants the opportunity to apply their training to real-world sales scenarios, and to gain hands-on customer experience. Over the last several years, the program has graduated more than 1500 account managers and systems engineers, representing over 40 countries and accounting for 10 percent of Cisco’s worldwide sales force. They contributed more than $1 billion in revenue and consistently achieved 100 percent of their sales quotas in their first year.
Cisco’s New Hire Network
The Cisco New Hire Network is a resource for new, early-in-career professionals. Like other Cisco employee resource groups (ERGs), the New Hire Network helps its members share knowledge, build leadership skills, and develop professional relationships. The program offers a self-paced, online training module covering Cisco history, customers, processes, and tools that helps acclimate new employees to Cisco’s corporate culture. It also provides opportunities for professional networking and collaboration with other new hires, and hosts a forum for conversing with company leaders. In August 2008, the New Hire Network held its first Welcome to Cisco event to formally welcome new employees and ease their assimilation into the company, including introducing them to the other Cisco ERGs.
Welcoming New Employees from Acquisitions
Acquisitions play an important role in Cisco’s strategy for long-term growth, and they are critical in successfully developing our next generation of products and solutions. We take care to welcome the employees of our acquisitions into the Cisco family, where they can benefit from expanded personal development and career opportunities. In fact, some of our most senior leaders originally joined Cisco from acquired companies. This supportive environment contributes to Cisco’s high retention rate of 80 percent of acquired employees since FY03.
Employees of a company that is being acquired can feel overwhelmed by the experience. Cisco uses a high-touch human resources (HR) model to introduce newly acquired employees to the company culture and make them feel at home. Communication is a vital component of this on-boarding process.
As soon as an acquisition is announced, a Cisco HR Acquisitions team is dispatched to the acquired company’s site. The team meets with employees to walk through the integration process and timeline, making sure they know what to expect in the upcoming weeks and resolving any urgent professional or personal concerns. Every new employee receives a welcome letter and a list of contacts for ongoing support. Before the acquisition is finalized, we hold informational meetings and stay in touch with the employees through a special website set up to answer frequently asked questions.
Engaging the managers of the acquired company is also a key part of the process. In doing so, we seek to involve these managers in the process of on-boarding the rest of the acquired employees. We work with the management team to integrate the new employees into our compensation structure, discussing each employee individually. For smaller acquisitions, the result of these discussions is usually a personal letter delivered to each employee prior to the acquisition closing date.
When the acquisition closes, we hold an onsite orientation meeting to ensure a smooth integration process for the new employees. This helps them become productive quickly, and assures them that a support structure is there when they need it. The New Employee Orientation includes information on a range of areas, including Cisco benefits, policies, workplace resources, and security. The HR Acquisitions team typically continues its high-touch model of involvement over the 30 days following the close of the acquisition, as employees transition to their new Cisco HR manager.
