Dan Heinrich Manuyag

I love being a resource to would-be applicants for our consulting positions, whether through campus visits or our recruitment webinar series, and coaching students and postdocs about how to build their CVs for non-academic careers.

Opening New Horizons for Ph.D. Students & Postdocs

One aspect of my work at Exponent is demystifying the recruiting process and what it takes to succeed at Exponent for students. Our goal is to be transparent in terms of what we're looking for in a candidate and the factors, including technical and behavioral competencies, we see as likely determinants of who would be a great match for a company like ours. 

A considerable part of my role has been maximizing our reach — expanding our talent pool to find the best, most qualified candidates on college campuses, through webinars, and at national conferences like those hosted by the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers or the Society of Women Engineers. 

In these forums, we're able to open new horizons for students, highlight what we're looking for, and educate them as well. As recruiters, we want to set these students up for success, so toward that goal we can act as proxies for would-be clients seeking highly specialized technical insights and guidance or even as proxies for juries hearing technical analysis for legal disputes, allowing them to exercise and develop their skills for parsing complex subject matter for lay audiences.

One of the best parts of my work is listening to people — hearing their stories and understanding how they think about their future and how they want to build it and then exploring how their values align with Exponent.

Exponent's DEI Principles & Practices

Another key part of my work is our diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) framework and advocating for equitable and accessible practices in Exponent's application and interviewing processes. Along these lines, I recently conducted a refresh of our interview training module to make it more inclusive to the wide range of backgrounds and perspectives that make Exponent such a special place. It's an example of how we strive to actualize our vision, mission, and values, supporting alignment across teams, practices, departments, and individuals.

One of the things that I'm proud I've supported is organizing an internal conversation and panel with members of our team across practices and in offices around the globe — with participants ranging from younger scientists to principals with decades of experience — about multigenerational work teams. Exponent is unique in that way: We have so many generations represented in our workforce, from Gen Zs to Baby Boomers. They could be working on the same team, which brings unique perspectives and experience to our work that you don't often see at other organizations and across different industries.

This panel was an opportunity for us to talk about why that makes us different and how we might be able to build better work teams and support the future of Exponent with these generational differences in mind. Through panel participation, we found that there are a lot of commonalities we all share and everyone in attendance was able to continue those discussions afterward — office to office, practice to practice, and in working together across teams. This experience highlighted the strength of our multigenerational work teams, which is, in itself, an Exponent asset valued by clients.

One thing that drew me to Exponent as a recruiter was being able to access the essence and ethos of academia — the life of the mind, in other words. Even though I'm not an engineer or scientist, I love that at Exponent I'm able to surround myself with extremely smart people who love to learn, and it's something that allows me to continue to learn about new things every day, too.