The Secret Sauce to Building a Successful Company Culture
By: Associate Consultant, Emily Mui
“Why are you interested in Veeva?”
My experience with Veeva began with this question during a phone call with one of their Associate Consultants. She was an alumna of the same program at Northeastern University that I was in the process of completing. At that time, she had been working as an Associate Consultant at Veeva for nearly a year, and I had reached out to her via LinkedIn after seeing Veeva on a list of company names that were attending Northeastern’s career fair. After exchanging polite greetings, she jumped straight into this question with confidence.
To be honest, I was not expecting this question so early on in our conversation, and looking back at the memory, I probably should have been more prepared. But after a moment of collecting my composure, I conveyed the thoughts that had been running through my head.
First, I knew that I wanted a position that would push me to develop the analytical skills that I had developed throughout my Industrial Engineering classes. After completing a few internships throughout college. I knew that I wanted to continue broadening my experiences by entering the fast-paced world of consulting. And most importantly, I knew that I wanted to work at a company that had an impact on others, ideally through healthcare.
From there, I began my two month and five-step long interview process with Veeva.
Why such an extensive process? Trust me — as a senior in college trudging my way through hundreds of job postings and dozens of potential LinkedIn connections, I had the same exact thought. It turns out, that’s part of Veeva’s secret sauce for success.
If you were to ask anyone at Veeva what they loved about the company, I guarantee that one of the top answers would be the company culture. That company culture doesn’t happen by accident though; you can’t develop an amazing company culture without investing the right amount of time and effort into hiring the right people.
The Interview Process:
1. University Recruiter
My first interview was with Sam Zeff, one of Veeva’s University Recruiters. I figured that this would be a general screening interview, but it ended up being so much more than that; this ended up being the first step of mapping out my career with Veeva. My conversation with Sam felt less like a test of whether or not I would contribute to Veeva, but how Veeva could help me succeed. After half an hour of discussing my skills, experiences, and what I hoped to learn in the first few years of my post-grad career, Sam pointed me in the direction of completing a candidate exercise with Matt Pearson, CRM practice manager of the Consultant Development Program.
2. The Business Case
Everyone who joins the Consultant Development Program, or CDP, completes a candidate exercise during their Veeva interview process. It consists of working on a short customer scenario we would encounter as consultants at veeva and getting the opportunity to see one of their software applications in action. Again, this step of the interview process was not only a practice to judge my potential, but it was also an exercise for me to determine whether or not this was the kind of work that I wanted to do on a daily basis.
After a week of building out my solution, I presented my Salesforce environment to Matt and three other CDPers, who would end up becoming my teammates after I joined Veeva. One of them actually ended up being my CRM training facilitator (hi, Lizzie!), and another one ended up being my CDP “Big Buddy” (hi, Dan!). I loved how connected I was to current CDPers during this interview process. It felt like everything was a two-way street — would I be a good fit for this team at Veeva, but also, did I like what they had to say when I asked about their work-life balance?
3. Hiring Manager
To say that Matt Pearson has had a positive impact on my experience with Veeva is an understatement. From the beginning of my interactions with Matt, while interviewing at Veeva, he has been nothing but encouraging and attentive.
During this step of the interview process, Matt told me all about the Consultant Development Program and assured me that I would always have a strong support network around me while in CDP. What has really stood out to me over the past year of knowing Matt is that, from the time that we first spoke, Matt made sure to treat me as an individual, and not just another resume. From one of our first conversations, he remembered my interests in data analytics, and from there, encouraged me to pursue learning about Nitro, Veeva’s cloud data warehouse service a few weeks after my orientation. Because of Matt, I’m learning skills that I have always wanted to obtain, and that will no doubt help me for the rest of my career.
4. Peer-to-Peer
The third step of my process was a peer-to-peer interview with a current CRM CDPer. Because I expressed interest in data, I was paired with Jeanette Si, an Associate Consultant at the time who was working on MyInsights, Veeva’s data visualization product. I remember preparing a whole page of questions to ask Jeanette to really prove my interest in becoming a consultant at Veeva. I’m not sure if I even got through all of those questions, but I do remember discussing art and museums. I think the peer-to-peer stage is one of the most important steps in Veeva’s process because it let me think to myself, “Would I want to work on a team with this person? Could we make casual conversation if we had to travel together?” My answer was a resounding yes, which was pretty lucky considering that Jeanette and I have now been staffed on the same project and have catchup calls every other week.
5. Leadership Team
My next set of interviews was with Sarah Young, the Director of Generation Veeva, and Steve Zimmerman, the VP of Commercial Services.
During my call with Sarah, I learned a lot about the history of the Consultant Development Program, as well Sarah’s ideas for the future of the initiative. The more I learned about CDP, the more excited I got. I’d be part of a program where I would be encouraged to push myself to learn as much as I can while always knowing that I had a safety net of a strong support system.
Then there was my call with Steve — this was the most intimidating step, and I remember thinking, “What could I possibly say to someone with a Vice President title when I haven’t even graduated yet?” Now, it feels ridiculous to have ever thought that. Since then, I’ve had even more interactions with Steve that have left me laughing, yet somehow feeling more knowledgeable than before.
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Looking back, I would not change anything about my interview experience. The fact that people at Veeva invested so much time in speaking with me and ensuring that I would benefit from this opportunity really set the stage for how the past ten months have been at this company and in the Consultant Development Program. I have never worked in such a supportive environment with such a fascinating group of people who have a variety of interests within Veeva and outside of work.
