Practical work experience is a must in today’s job market. College graduates who come armed with practical experience in their majors as well as quality education will rise to the top of the list of candidates for the best paying jobs. Bearing this in mind, employers should take advantage of the opportunity to grab those rising stars early on and cultivate the best employees for their companies through the use of internships and cooperative education programs. To help employers achieve these goals, CollegeRecruiter.com has released a free white paper entitled The Best Practices for Creating and Maintaining Successful Internship Program.
The purpose of this new white paper is to help employers get the most out of their college and university hiring pipelines by helping them to build and maintain a successful internship program. By the end of the white paper, employers will know how to get the most out of their interns and how to instill in them a desire to have a career with the employer’s company over any other. In addition, employers will learn how to keep their pipeline flowing, generating new talent year after year. In short, the white paper will explain to employers why successful internship programs are all about recruiting permanent employees.
Internships and cooperative education programs (co-ops) are an invaluable way for employers and students to check each other out and see if they would be a good fit for each other. More than 75 percent of respondents in a recent survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) said that their primary reason for having internship programs is to fuel their college recruiting program. Bringing in students directly from college is key to having a good, sustainable pipeline of employment, Lonnie Pacelli, human resources consultant in Sammamish, WA, told John Rossheim in his article Workforce Insights: Hard-Driving Internships Are Key to Entry-Level Recruitment. Internships are, for lack of better description, temp-to-perm relationships.
Internships can be either paid or unpaid and may or may not offer college credit for participation. Co-ops, on the other hand, are almost always paid and tend to have longer durations. While internships are generally done during the summer months when students can work full-time without worrying about homework or class schedules, they can be performed during the fall and spring semesters. Co-ops are more of a 50-50 split between full-time education and full-time employment and, unlike internships, co-ops can last for three to four years. Either way, students and employers benefit from the opportunity to learn about each other and decide whether or not a long term working relationship is likely to succeed.
Employers which are able to successfully convert a high percentage of their interns into permanent employees offer quality internship programs. Those programs are designed, in part, to cause the intern to want to work for the employer permanently. Companies that use interns like temps to pick up the slack will not be as successful as those employers that give interns real responsibilities and real tasks to perform. Providing a real experience to your interns tells them that you valued them.
Another way to succeed in persuading interns is with benefits. Many companies offer interns benefits such as paid holidays, relocation assistance and planned social activities. Today’s college graduates are looking for jobs that pay well, offer good benefits like 401(k), paid vacation and generous maternity leaves. If it is made known to them during the recruitment process what they can expect, the odds of getting quality candidates right away increase dramatically. But don’t focus solely on recruiting students for internships; plan ahead for when they are ready to enter the work world full time. Organizations that have both a strong employment brand as well as a relationship with a variety of students on campuses tend over time to have greater success in getting students to say yes to their offers, says Kevin Wheeler in his article Build a Candidate Pipeline Through Internships.
Copies of The Best Practices for Creating and Maintaining a Successful Internship Program are available at no charge from CollegeRecruiter.com at www.CollegeRecruiter.com/pages/white-papers.php.
Practical work experience is a must in today’s job market
College graduates who come armed with practical experience in their majors as well as quality education will rise to the top of the list of candidates for the best paying jobs
