You might think that recruiting interns and new team members would be an impossible task in a locked-down world. Cher Whee Sim, Micron’s senior director of Global Talent Acquisition and Mobility, set me straight. In many ways, thanks to the tenacity and innovation of her team, the opposite is true.

One of her team’s innovations that really struck me was their repurposing of robotic automation tools from our chip factories to make “virtual career fairs” work. In fact, the tools worked very well at scale, something that we would previously have thought impossible.

We’re also using new tools to promote diversity in talent acquisition and reinforce Micron’s inclusive culture. Sim gave me examples such as modifying job descriptions to weed out unconscious gender bias, using AI to reduce bias in candidate applications, and ensuring interviewing teams are also diverse.

But what about interns? The whole point of the intern experience is to dive into a company and meet as many people as possible. Sim is justifiably proud of how her team has reinvented the program to give our hundreds of interns a research-based, structured program solving real problems for Micron.

Sim told me that “two delightful things” have come from the redesign to a remote program:

• The program has gone global — interns are no longer restricted by their physical location.
• We are having professors give seminars that can be attended by the entire intern population.

So, while other companies are scaling back, Micron’s talent acquisition team is living Micron’s values of tenacity and innovation and forging ahead. As Sim says, “We’re defining our new normal.”

You can watch more interviews in our “Pulling Together” series and learn more about how Micron is supporting our worldwide communities at www.micron.com/covid-19.