Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Enterprise Rent-A-Car Named to BusinessWeek's

Top 50 Places to Launch a Career for Third Straight Year

Company cites ability to start a career from nearly anywhere in the country, promote-from-within culture, commitment to sustainability as big winners with college graduates

October 14, 2008 (St. Louis, Mo.) - For the third consecutive year, Enterprise Rent-A-Car has been named to BusinessWeek's annual ranking of the best companies for new college graduates to launch their careers.

In naming companies to the list, BusinessWeek used three sources of data - a survey of college career-services directors, a survey of employers and a student survey conducted by Universum Communications, a market-research firm based in Philadelphia. This year, as in the past two, Enterprise received especially high marks from career-services directors, who placed the company in their top five.

"It's a tremendous honor to be recognized by BusinessWeek for the third consecutive year," said Marie Artim, the company's assistant vice president, recruiting. "We've worked hard as a company to build and maintain a strong culture of opportunity; and our recruiters work just as hard to communicate that culture to our job candidates and form great relationships with career services professionals at colleges and universities throughout North America. This honor is a real tribute to those efforts."

Enterprise also is featured in a new book based on the annual rankings from last year. BusinessWeek Fast Track: The Best Places to Launch a Career, by Lindsey Gerdes, was published this summer by McGraw-Hill.

Enterprise has been widely recognized for its well-developed management training program and its promote-from-within business model. Nearly 100 percent of Enterprise's current senior management team - including Chairman and CEO Andy Taylor, and President and COO Pam Nicholson - started at the rental counter, learning the business from the ground up.

At Baylor University, Enterprise hires about 13 students each year, and there are 40 alumni from Baylor, currently working throughout the Enterprise network of businesses.

Ryanne Janca is a local recruiter for Enterprise, and recruits potential employees from Baylor University. She said, "Enterprise has been very impressed with the quality of Baylor graduates because they consistently have what it takes, the skills and the drive, to run a business. They have a very solid educational background, and our management training program jumpstarts their careers toward success."

In addition to learning the Enterprise brand of personalized customer service, the company's management trainees work in the local offices and are involved in the day-to-day imperatives of running a business. The program teaches them business-to-business marketing and sales, to manage profit and loss and to control expenses, and to implement a comprehensive business plan. Within nine to 12 months, individuals are typically eligible for promotion and the opportunity to help run the rental branch as if it were their own business, including sharing in the profits they help create.

"New employees also like the fact that Enterprise's neighborhood model means they can launch a meaningful career from most anywhere in the country," Artim said. "We have more than 6,000 locations throughout The U.S., which provide the opportunity to work where employees want to live, whether that's near family or in a particular part of the country."

According to Artim, Enterprise's attractiveness as an employer goes beyond the opportunities it provides to include the values the company practices. "We are seeing more and more entry-level employees who are excited about coming to work for us, because they feel good about our industry-leading environmental stewardship efforts and our active commitment to the communities where we do business," she said. "Our philosophy of 'doing well by doing good' clearly resonates with many in the current generation."

Enterprise also offers more than 2,000 internships a year. In 2006, Fortune.com named Enterprise one of the "Five Best Internships for Real Work." Interns at Enterprise are involved in all aspects of the business and are given responsibilities similar to those of full-time employees.

In addition to its ranking on the BusinessWeek list this year, Enterprise has also been featured in the past three editions of Princeton Review's Best Entry-Level Jobs. Collegegrad.com and Black Collegian have for 5 and 9 years, respectively, recognized Enterprise as the No. 1 employer and recruiter of college graduates, and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education ranked the company No.1 on its 2006 list of the "Top 30 National Firms Most Effective at Diversity Recruiting."

For more information about Enterprise or its management training program, visit enterprise.com/careers. Students can also contact their career centers to learn about more opportunities at Enterprise.

About Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Founded in 1957 and headquartered in St. Louis, Enterprise Rent-A-Car is an internationally recognized brand with the largest fleet of passenger vehicles in the world today, more than 700,000 cars and trucks. Enterprise also operates a network of 7,000 neighborhood and airport rental locations in the United States, Canada, the U.K., Ireland, and Germany. Enterprise of North America is part of a global strategic alliance with Europcar, creating the world's largest car rental network.

As North America's largest car rental company, Enterprise is known for its exceptionally low rates, neighborhood convenience and its outstanding service, including picking up local customers at no extra cost. Ranked No. 18 on the Forbes Top 500 Private Companies in America, Enterprise has branch offices located within 15 miles of 90 percent of the U.S. population. In addition, Enterprise has ranked highest in customer satisfaction among airport rentals in eight out of the past nine years, according to J.D. Power and Associates Rental Car Satisfaction Study. For more information about Enterprise, visit www.enterprise.com.

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