By Jennifer Scuteri
NFL Player Engagement
They may already share the same city and senior leadership in Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, but the Seattle Seahawks’ connection with the giant tech company just got even deeper.
Under the direction of Seattle’s Director of Player Engagement, Mo Kelly, four current and one former Seahawks players piloted a one-week job-shadowing program with Microsoft, which took place June 17th through 21st.
“Our team owner is the co-founder of Microsoft,” Kelly said. “They’ve done our Players Lounge and they have a connection, but I just thought we needed to have a deeper connection and have our players get intertwined with the Microsoft brand. The whole idea was to have job shadowing opportunities that could potentially turn into a job internship program moving forward”
Kelly connected with Mark Hatcher of Pro Rx and Paul Horace, the CFO of the Startup Business Group at Microsoft to orchestrate the program. The three men interviewed potential job-shadow candidates, each of whom had perfected their resumes with Lee Hecht Harrison beforehand.
“The thought process going in was that we would have five candidates and take the best two or three out of the that five,” Kelly said. “They came in, they all came dressed to a T, they all had their resumes and kicked butt at the whole interview process. At the end of it all, we were like, ‘How can we turn down anybody? We should use all five.’”
And so five NFL players spent time in the Microsoft offices. Kicker Steven Hauschka spent a week in the Research and Development department, while all-pro left tackle Russell Okung worked in Marketing, and long snapper Clint Gresham shadowed Microsoft’s Jeff Allen. Even a Seahawks rookie, Greg Scruggs, put his business savvy to the test, working in the Finance department of the Microsoft Windows Phone.
Even Ben Obomanu, who was on the Seahawks roster for seven years, and now plays for the New York Jets, participated in the program. Because Ben had successfully completed his MBA through the Continuing Education Program and still lives in the Seattle area, Kelly knew he was the right candidate for the job shadow in Microsoft’s Finance department.
“They are on their vacation,” Kelly said. “So it says a lot about our players that they are willing to use their vacation time to take part in this program.”
Kelly hopes that this format can be repeated next year with both Microsoft and Boeing, another large corporation in the Seattle area. Ultimately, he hopes that these job shadowing programs can be folded into Player Engagement’s existing Career Internship Program and become available to players all-around the League.
“We want to use this moving forward with all of the other major companies in this area —Boeing, Google, all of these other places. So we’ll have the blueprint,” he said. “Ideally, to add to what the thought process was from the beginning, we want to eventually open it up for everybody in the League.”