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Everyone who has started a job at a new company knows about the orientation process that you have to go through… it’s painful, boring and tedious. They become something that you have to survive rather than something you enjoy. We’ve all been through it; wishing that we could change the way orientation was and make it better. I never would have imagined that, as an intern at Quicken Loans, I would be given the chance to do just that!

Being obsessed with finding a better way; one of the ISMs that we live by at Quicken Loans, we didn’t settle at having a good orientation process. We wanted it to be AMAZING! The Pulse, what we call our Human Resources Team, came up with the idea of creating a “Welcome Video” for all of our new team members.

To launch this project I, along with all of the interns in The Pulse, was brought on board to create this video from the ground up. It was an incredible experience; being given a project to own and have creative freedom. I got the chance to brainstorm ideas with the other interns. One of the ideas we came up with was to have our very own CEO, Bill Emerson, lip sync to Steppenwolfe’s “Born To Be Wild” while riding a scooter through our Detroit offices. To get this idea started, I first had to get in touch with our video team to borrow some camera equipment. Then, I had the opportunity to work with the copy writers on our Marketing Team to create a digital flier to send out to team members asking them to participate in our video project.

Finally, and this part I was a little nervous about, I needed to send a meeting request to Bill Emerson asking him if he would ride a scooter around the office while lip syncing “Born To Be Wild.” To say that I was intimidated is an understatement. I read and re-read my message about 100 times before finally mustering up the confidence to hit “send.” Then I waited… not very long in retrospect, but it felt like an eternity in the moment. Bill responded rather quickly and accepted the invitation to be a part of our video!

I was pretty nervous on the day of filming. There I stood, an intern, about to direct a video with the CEO of the company that I worked for. Internally, I was thinking “how am I going to tell this guy what to do and how to do it? He’s gonna’ yell at me.” Actually, in reality, it was quite the opposite. I wasn’t treated like an “intern” as depicted in movies and TV shows. I was treated as one of the team members. He cared about the project we were working on and did his best to bring our vision and ideas into reality.

To see the CEO of a company do something like that was completely foreign to me. This act, however, is the pure manifestation of the “work hard play hard” culture of Quicken Loans. It was a great opportunity for the interns of The Pulse to meet and work with the CEO along with the benefit of seeing him do something fun and playful FOR work!  It was a great experience that we never would have received at a different company.

I’d love to share the video with you, but it’s reserved for our amazing new team members.  Wanna see it? Apply for a position at Quicken Loans and see how our video and our culture is Engineered to Amaze!

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