A Pair of Winners at Purdue

PROVO, Utah – Dec 01, 2017 – Thirty minutes before their presentation, two Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business teams had a spinning, last-minute curveball thrown in their direction. But while it took them by surprise, the teams hit the additional issue with a home run solution to each win first place at the Purdue Human Resources Case Competition.

An undergraduate and an MBA team represented BYU Marriott in separate divisions, but both worked on the case involving a civil engineering company called CH2M. Teams were asked to address three issues targeting millennial employees: retaining, recruiting, and incentivizing relocation to remote areas.

Cameron Mulder, a first-year MBA student from Eugene, Oregon, says thirty minutes before their presentations, the judges added another element where teams were asked to show how at least one of CH2M’s five company values is heavily connected to their solution. 

“For some teams, it was hardly touched on at all, so they had to spend the last thirty minutes trying to build that part,” Mulder says. “We were fortunate to have already addressed the curveball in the employee value proposition of our presentation, so we were not panicked. In fact, our response to them was positive—they said this is the first response they got that wasn’t loathing.”

Both the undergraduate and graduate teams shared similar solutions where they created a development program giving millennial employees the opportunity to sink their teeth into a company.

“Our solutions were similar to the graduate students, which shows the quality of our undergrad education,” says Grant Fuller, an HR management senior from Indianapolis, Indiana.  “I value my education a lot, and BYU Marriott has prepared me in a diverse area of ways.”

In the end, the graduate team won $5,000 and the undergraduate team won $3,000. Team members from both teams expressed gratitude to BYU Marriott for providing the chance to go to Purdue and compete.

“It’s great that the school trusts us, and we were able to produce, perform, and build the BYU Marriott brand,” Mulder says.