ReturnShip Program, Part III
I’ve written a couple times this past year about our ReturnShip program, which is a 4-month paid internship program designed for women who have been out of the workforce for more than 3 year to re-enter and build credible and relevant experience, and to expand the talent pool for our organization. I wrote about the initial concept when we launched v2 of the program, and then again when v2 concluded with the hiring of four of the six participants.
I’m immensely proud of our organization for inventing the program (Andy Sautins, our CTO, gets credit) and for managing it so well during the last cycle (Cathy Hawley, our VP People, and Miranda Reeves, VP Solution Management, get lead credit, but lots of other people had a hand in its success).
Yesterday, we officially launched v3 of the program and are very excited about how it is scaling. The launch was coincident with a visit to our office by Congressman Jared Polis, who represents our district in Colorado, as part of his Startup Day Across America visit to the district, which was exciting for us.
v3 of the program is poised to take the concept to the next level. We will have almost 40 Returnees in the program – but we’ve taken the program beyond Return Path and beyond our Colorado office. We are going to place Returnees in five locations – Broomfield, Colorado, New York City, Austin, Indianapolis, and London – and we recruited five like-minded partner companies to join the program as well. SendGrid, ReadyTalk, MWH Global, and SpotXchange will participate in the program in the Denver area, and Seattle-based Moz will participate as well. We are still going to administer the program out of Return Path, with Andy and Cathy being joined by Katie Green from our People team as well as Laura Harrison, one of our v2 Returnees, as program manager (among others).
We are starting the recruiting cycle now for the program, which starts mid-October. While we are getting a centralized web site up and running, in the meantime, you can see the available openings on the respective company web sites:
- ReturnPath @ http://bit.ly/1PhaweF
- MWH Global @ http://bit.ly/1JfHUgz
- SpotXchange @ http://bit.ly/1CPqR22
- Sendgrid @ http://bit.ly/1CTmjtk
- ReadyTalk @ http://bit.ly/1gu4sU1
- Moz (coming soon)
Here are a couple pictures from our time with Congressman Polis yesterday – one of him and Laura Harrison, Karen Brockwell, and Lisa Stephens (three of our v2 Returnees), and one of me along with representatives of the other participating companies.
