Employer

DECEMBER

Stacie Celinscak, Department Manager – Lease Transaction Management, on intern Vathsala Carvalho

December | Mentor

“Sometimes the greatest assets are the ones that come to us via different avenues! In this particular circumstance Vathsala Carvalho came to RBC with an audit and finance background moving from Sri Lanka to Canada and within four weeks of her move, she was offered a contract with the Equipment Finance Solutions Centre in Burlington. Once Vathsala arrived the dynamics within the department changed with her unique approach and personality; she took to learning leasing immediately and with her financial skillset, knowledge and background quickly made her something special whom stood out and we certainly took notice!

Vathsala’s proactive behaviours combined with her background kick-started her burgeoning RBC career and she shone from the very start and Vathsala consistently provides a high level of service day in and day out. She is always accessible to discuss and review transactions and is very eager to engage directly with clients to resolve outstanding items and keep transactions moving forward. Regardless of the challenges, stress or workload, Vathsala always remains calm, professional and cheerful when engaging with internal or external partners and our clients. Vathsala’s willingness to go above and beyond to support the team has been demonstrated on many occasions wherein she has stepped in to support other LTM team members and stayed late at work to ensure that our client’s transactions are processed in a timely manner. Vathsala manages the Equipment Finance Specialists extremely well, so well that she has zero escalations and minimal rushes. This is an extreme feat within a high velocity division and Vathsala has stepped up to this challenge each and every day and makes herself accountable for all aspects of her day-to-day workflow.

Vathsala has truly gained some invaluable experience since the move to Canada and RBC has gained an outstanding employee who was eager to learn coupled with an amazing personality and proactive attitude. The experience Vathsala gained and the networking within RBC was dual-sided, we provided an opportunity to an up and coming employee and received an outstanding worker who assisted with a resourcing gap within the department who was such a remarkable fit that was offered full-time once her contract was completed and continues to be a top performer and is already after only a year deemed a Senior Lease Transaction Manager. We continue to look forward to the opportunities and challenges that we will provide Vathsala as she continues to raise the bar for her success as well as the success of RBC.”

NOVEMBER

Michele Murphy, Vice President, Operations, on intern Nikita Henriques

November | Mentor

“Nikita is an absolute pleasure to work with! She is highly dependable, always professional and courteous and full of enthusiasm even when she must deal with difficult situations. Her ability to take direction and run with it to resolve problems is fantastic. We are very lucky to have her as part of our organization!”

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OCTOBER

Zoe Rakotomanga, Manager, Campus Recruiting, on intern Andrea Kedves

October | Mentor

“Andrea started working for Sun Life in July 2017 to support the campus recruiting team during our busy season. She was able to adapt well to the team and in no time was able to get things done quickly requiring very little guidance and supervision. After only a few weeks, she was already looking for better ways to get her work done. She still challenges the status quo daily and wants to ensure we are completing our work in the most efficient way. We received very positive feedback from her clients, thanking her for being always available and ready to help.

After her internship ended in December, we were happy to offer her a full-time position on our team. She continues to do excellent work, currently managing a few of her own projects and presenting some of her work to senior leaders. Her patience, energy and great attention to detail makes her a great asset! Our team is definitely lucky to have her!”

SEPTEMBER

Rick Merhai, Head of Payment Security, on intern Gurnita Chandhoke

September | Mentor

“Gurnita was brought in to support my team on enterprise wide initiatives. She has been instrumental in preparing business requirements, training material and process documentation. Her eagerness to learn and ability to quickly pick things up allowed her to move into a process owner role supporting our enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance tool. She is a shining example of a team player and never says no any ask. Gurnita has proved and continues to prove to be an asset to the team and has exceeded expectations.”

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AUGUST

Alison Bishop, Senior Manager Training and Communications, on intern Craig Sargent

Alison Bishop joined by her intern Craig Sargent

“Craig has done an OUTSTANDING job as a member of the Virgin Mobile comms team. He independently worked to develop and execute projects like the new hardware grid, Apple launch, Black Friday and Holiday competitive responses in 2017, and is off to an awesome start for 2018.

He’s eager to learn, works well as a part of a team, and on his own.”

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JULY

Sophia Tsang (HR Manager) on intern Ian Kroetsch

Ian Kroetsch (right) joined by team member Calvin Yoa

“Ian was one of our first interns from Career Edge and his skills were outside what we would usually consider. For example, he graduated from Bachelor of Arts in History and we are an IT firm and usually looking for hires that either have an engineering or computer science degree.

Ian surpassed our expectations, he not only was able to pick up the technical skills, his soft skills are excellent. He’s now helping us build the culture of our company.”

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JUNE

June | Mentor

David Tan, Director, Corporate Project Governance, on former intern Jovita Shetty

“Jovita is an incredible individual with passion, energy, dedication and commitment.  She very quickly got up to speed in her immediate responsibilities, and she jumped in and took on additional work in two other projects.

She has an infectious positive attitude and is an individual that anyone will want on their team.”

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MAY

Vivian Li, Senior Manager, Inclusive Recruitment, on intern Alelie Ocampo

Vivian Li (left) & Alelie Ocampo

“When initially onboarding the role, Alelie received limited training due to the sudden departure of the previous program manager and at the same time there was a big volume increase from RBC hiring managers. Under great pressure, Alelie not only took the initiative to learn the process, but also identified opportunities to streamline the existing process and created easy-to-follow job aids / FAQs for hiring managers, which received great feedback from the businesses we support.

In Spring 2017, RBC Procurement implemented new invoicing process for programs like Career Edge. It is a huge change management for both our vendor Career Edge Organization and our hiring managers. In order to create a seamless experience for hiring managers, Alelie took it on herself to partner with RBC’s procurement colleagues and learned about the new invoicing process so that she can direct hiring managers to the right steps when they have questions. This huge undertaking on Alelie’s part saved the hiring managers a lot of time navigating the non-user-friendly system and moved the payment steps forward.

Due to our successful promotion of program to internal hiring managers, our hiring volume increased 60% in 2017 ( 68 new interns in 2016 and 110 new interns in 2017). Alelie took the full accountability and delivered great quality services to our hiring managers.  She also took every opportunity to promote the program to both internal hiring managers and external candidates who could potentially benefit the program.

RBC helped 110 interns who traditionally face employment barriers (new grads, grads with disabilities, newcomer professionals and reservists) gain valuable work experience, which is 60% more than last year. We are the first organization that exceeded 100 intern hires in Career Edge’s history in the last 15 years!

Alelie’s great work directly contributed to the great social impact RBC is able to create through this internship program.”

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APRIL

April | Mentor

Esther Bye, HR Advisor, on intern Brendan McGeagh

“Brendan is exceptionally smart and genuinely kind. He helped us with a great deal of new initiatives, policy writing and cleaning up our files and creating consistent templates. We were able to train him on our payroll system and gave him many opportunities to learn in as many areas as he could.

His competence and quiet communication style put people at ease and helped to calm some heated debates.

He was working for us on a contract but has since moved on to something new. He is much missed, and I hope to be able to work with him again in the future.”

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