By Colleen Heathman
Jan. 26, 2012
Are you looking to improve your internship program, recruiting or employee morale? You can tackle these areas through fostering a welcoming corporate culture and training interns to become part of it. If you’re looking beyond filling a position and instead to retain entry-level employees or interns long-term, the following variables will set your organization up with a foundation for success: establish a sustainable recruiting philosophy; empower people; and create a culture that values all people.
Establish a sustainable recruiting philosophy
Many companies view their internship programs and full-time employee recruiting as separate initiatives with separate goals. At Vertafore, our internship program is integrated with our ongoing recruiting. By viewing every candidate as an asset, whether they are applying for an internship or senior-level position, we can better gauge how their career and goals will align with our company vision.
For example, to best evaluate the skills and passions of candidates, interviews simulate the work intern candidates will do during their internships with the team they will be working with. An intern applying to work on a development team will walk through a coding problem on a whiteboard. If all goes well, they have a working session with the team that is hiring. The candidate gets hands-on experience on what it is like to work at the company and the team gets a chance to gauge their potential new member. Once interns are hired, we connect them with their team dynamic in order to understand the collaborative environment. Consequently, interns are embedded in teams with full-time employees (versus being isolated in a lone cubicle) to gain exposure to what their teams do on a daily basis. By the end of the internship, they are a fully contributing member of the team who has experienced the culture and contributed toward actual product releases.
“Our internship program is by far our best recruitment tool,” says Josh Zook, vice president of Product Development. “It allows us to gain a personal working relationship with young, top talent coming out of local universities. They get to experience what it is like to work for us and we get a good feel for how they will fit in with the teams. Because of the success of our internships, we have a very high conversion rate to full-time employees and a very low attrition rate once they do decide to start their career with us.”