Graduates from Hillsdale’s class of 2021 have found success at companies and organizations like the Mayo Clinic, The Wall Street Journal, and the U.S. Senate, not to mention Amazon, Goldman Sachs, and Fox. But what is it about the alumni of a small liberal arts college in rural Michigan that stand out so much to employers?
Bill Moore has special insight into this trend. Co-founder of the Moore Group, a for-profit fundraising firm that owns 42 smaller companies and employs 4500 people, Moore has hired 16 Hillsdale alumni in recent years, and is in the process of hiring several more.
“I’ve never ever found any candidate from Hillsdale that I haven’t offered a position to,” he said.
Moore has been continually impressed by the quality of his Hillsdale hires.
“One of the things that I’ve found about Hillsdale students versus other ones is that they’re hard workers, and of course smart,” he said. “But you can have smart people that don’t know how to communicate. And this is true of every one of them- even the math majors, and that surprised me.”
Some of his hires include Alexandra Whitford ’17, Account Executive for Direct Donor TV and Aidan Wheeler ’21, Associate Director of Business Development for SimioCloud.
Wheeler appreciates the commonalities between the environment at Moore and at Hillsdale.
“At Moore, I found an enterprise filled with talented and hard-working professionals that remind me of the professors and students I met at Hillsdale,” he said. “I work in a challenging and fulfilling role servicing some of the country’s largest nonprofits and political organizations.”
Whitford described her role allowing her to “marry passion with purpose, and create lasting impact through our clients and their missions,” something she felt her education prepared her for well.
The first Hillsdale graduate Moore hired was Macy Mount ’18, who graduated with a politics degree. She served in the Trump administration as a speechwriter for the president and now works for Resource One, a Moore Group company, doing nonprofit work for groups like Wounded Warriors Project, Young America’s Foundation, and American Red Cross.
Mount said she appreciates the way her role at Resource One of account executive and business development director aligns with the same values she learned at Hillsdale.
“I wanted a mission-oriented job that built up my strengths, challenged me, and put me in a position to help nonprofits do life-changing work,” she said.
Mount cites work ethic as something that translates well from the Hillsdale campus, where students juggle rigorous academics, social life, and a multitude of extracurriculars, to a corporate environment.
“Hillsdale students go the extra mile, take initiative, and are looking for needs that must be met and ways to meet them.”
Hillsdale graduates also possess a unique talent for listening. Mount says her boss Moore often remarks that, “You guys just know how to instantly make eye contact. You don’t try to talk over anyone and you don’t need to be told anything twice.”
Mount said Hillsdale graduates’ mature communication skills extend from solid writing skills to hopping on phone calls to describe ideas accurately and clearly.
“It was exciting for me to join an industry that was new to me,” Mount said. “I think that the love of learning that’s cultivated at Hillsdale translates really, really well even into the private sector business world. We take that love of learning and apply it to every aspect. The camaraderie and spirit of the Hillsdale community, and the deep friendships fostered in such an environment, grow this love of learning.”
Moore is always on the lookout for impressive candidates to work in his company and in the broader non-profit field.
“We do need future leaders, and a lot of them are going to be from Hillsdale,” Moore said.