Last weekend I had the pleasure of seeing the witty comedy The Internship starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. I went to this movie to experience the dynamic duo from the Wedding Crashers again, but I discovered the movie paralleled an important aspect of my job as a recruiter and university recruiting subject matter expert.
When the general population hears the word “intern,” they often think of the 21-year-old you recruit to file your papers, get your coffee, and complete those other tedious tasks you’d rather not spend your time doing. While this stereotypical view of internships has evolved, there are still internship programs in need of revamping. And The Internship provided some fresh ideas about how to do that. keep reading…
Unpaid internships have been a dicey proposition for employers for almost as long as the Fair Labor Standards Act has been on the books.
For the first several decades since Congress adopted the law in 1938, the disputes were largely about employer training and apprenticeship programs and whether those trainees who weren’t paid were employees. If they were, they had to be paid and they were subject to other wage and hour rules.
These days, the issues almost all are about corporate internship programs, and whether the college students — and recent alums — have to be paid. If your company pays, even if it’s just minimum wage, you have nothing to fear from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.
For everyone else — and that’s a fairly significant one-third of all internships – this week’s decision against movie company Fox Searchlight should give you reason to evaluate the nature of your program and how it is actually being administered by supervisors.
It’s all well and good to declare in your internship materials that you provide training, hands-on experience doing real work, regular evaluations, and the like. But if the interns’ direct supervisors turn them into mere gophers, provide little or no training, and have them fill-in for regular employees who leave, you have a potential lawsuit in the works, even if the students say nothing. keep reading…
While the debate rages on about the future of the resume, there’s angst, but not as much, over the destiny of the cover letter.
A year ago Fortune asked “Are we killing off the cover letter?” The answer, at least according to the survey the article references, is a resounding yes.
Earlier though, Ruby on Rails creator and 37Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson insisted, “A great resume will get you not-rejected, a great cover letter will get you hired.”
But compared to the “Resume: Love ‘em or Leave ‘em” controversy, the cover letter discussion comes down as more Solomonic. Four years ago, ERE’s founder and chairman David Manaster analyzed the relevance of the cover letter in the (then)-still-dawning age of social recruiting, summing it up this way: keep reading…
average intern hourly wage rates, by class
Typically, interns are paid an hourly wage determined by degree level, class year, and academic major. Interns usually fall into the “non-exempt” category due to the nature of their positions. Seniors, according to the 2012 Guide to Compensation for Interns & Co-ops, earn 26.3 percent more than their freshman cohorts. A master’s degree intern is paid 35 percent more than a bachelor’s degree intern.
Students earning engineering and computer science degrees are usually paid higher wages than students in other disciplines, regardless of class year. At the high end, senior engineering students averaged intern wages of $20.79 per hour. Computer science/IT interns earned $19.10 per hour. On the other end of the scale, senior agriculture majors picked up $15.71 per hour, among the lowest average hourly pay rates.
A word of caution: Your interns will talk amongst themselves, so apply your pay scales consistently. keep reading…
Recently, NBC News announced that it would begin to pay its college interns because the network hopes to attract more minority talent.
If you pay your interns, you get a much larger candidate pool. You get students whose parents can support them while they work for free, plus talented students who need to earn tuition money for school.
Who pays their interns and who doesn’t pay their interns? Is it fair to expect a college student (who may have huge educational loans to repay) to work for free or for “the experience?” Does paying an intern pay off for employers?
Here’s your answer, based on research from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. keep reading…
An IT recruiting tool. An internship community. A new branding/careersite company. A video interviewer.
A website for “challenges” students can take, leading to a job.
And, two big new launches from the applicant tracking company Jobvite.
All below. keep reading…
Bob is the kind of guy people don’t look at twice. He’s described as a family man, quiet, and inoffensive. For years he got stellar performance reviews, describing him as “the best developer in the building.”
But Bob had a secret. Years ago he had outsourced his job to China. Instead of slaving away writing software code, Bob spent his day surfing the Internet. Investigators discovered what Bob was doing only because his Chinese contractors regularly logged into the company’s network. When they dug through his work computer, they discovered “hundreds of .pdf invoices from a third party contractor/developer in (you guessed it) Shenyang, China.”
As they dug deeper, the investigators reconstructed a typical Bob day: keep reading…
Those looking to get other songs out of their head can enjoy a Gangnam parody, courtesy NASA interns.
NASA Johnson Style, as it’s called, has racked up more than 4 million views — quite a bit even for an organization used to big responses. The students who created it are in the Pathways Intern Employment Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
An intern from North Carolina State University is one of the stars; a Penn State intern is the editor; NASA astronauts provide cameos.
If you want an internship that involves making coffee, and then making some more coffee, this internship’s not for you.
That’s the message from this music video called Hire Me, Maybe, whose chorus will be stuck in your head longer than you want it to. It was made by interns at the eyewear designer-distributor ClearVision; I thought I’d pass it along since quite a few ERE readers ask about interesting careers-related videos (Julia Gometz, formerly with JetBlue, pointed this one out to me today).
ClearVision looks for interns who, among other qualities (interpersonal skills, leadership, communication skills — you know the drill) have a GPA of 3.3 of above. Interns participate in workshops like one on “the Science of Shopping” and another on left- vs. right-brain thinking. They also do community service work, such as at a camp called Kehilla, for kids with social/emotional/learning challenges.
The song was inspired by Carly Rae Jepsen’s. It’s about three minutes long, below. keep reading…
A new “matching” site, a new social media/employee-referral site, and the negatives of stripping.
Yes, it’s our regular roundup of recruiting and HR happenings, below.
With final exams underway at colleges across the U.S., it’s only a matter of weeks before the first of millions of young Millennials will be out of school for the summer. Will they have jobs?
The answer is a resounding, “Maybe.”
The National Association of Colleges and Employers says employers expect to hire more new grads this year than last, and the hiring picture has even improved since early last fall. The organization’s spring survey update found employers are planning to increase their grad hiring by 10.2 percent over last year. In the fall survey, the increase was 9.5 percent.
CareerBuilder reports that 54 percent of the companies it surveyed plan to hire from this year’s graduating class. That represents a 17 percent improvement over last year’s results.
Students looking for internships should also have an easier time. Another NACE survey found intern hiring plans are up 8.5 percent over last year. Not surprisingly, the best salaries will go to students in engineering and computer science programs. They’ll earn, on average, $20.79 and $19.10 respectively, says NACE. keep reading…
On Wednesday one of the newest startups to focus on internships will host one of the largest, if not the biggest, online workshops to be held on Google+.
In a sign of maturity for the social network Google launched last summer, as well as for InternMatch, a “names” group of companies have signed on to host one-hour segments for college students hoping to land an internship.
For instance, hiring managers from Nestle Purina will discuss the ins and outs of building connections and using social media in searching and landing internships. Google’s engineering recruiting lead, Jeff Moore, will do a segment on “Hacking the Engineering Internship Application,” which, presumably, won’t involve any actual hacking, but advice on how to get through the process and stand out from the crowd.
After seven hours of sessions, InternMatch will throw open the doors, so to speak, for 17 hours of online, interactive help for students. The 24-hour marathon, which begins Wednesday at 9:50 a.m. Pacific time, will end Thursday at 10 a.m. Pacific.
The event makes use of Hangouts, the video chat and conferencing service that is part of Google+. Hangouts is interactive for up to 10 participants, but it has a broadcast feature that’s essentially a video stream for hundreds or thousands of viewers. The seven segments will be recorded for later viewing. keep reading…
In today’s roundup we’re going to give you the secret to a more productive workforce. This isn’t one of those five-tip lists that tell you to start by raising the level of engagement.
Nope. The secret we’re going to share is something every company can do and costs nothing, unless you want it to. Even then, it will cost around $5 a year, but give you an ROI of about 50 to 1.
First, Todd insists on sharing about a new recruiting site. Here he is to tell you about it himself. keep reading…
Ending what, for most, is a short week, we bring you the penultimate Friday roundup for 2011. Today’s collection includes mystery applicants, a police recruiting campaign gone bad, and Salesforce’s Rypple.
We start with a job seeker good deed from the Challenger people:
Free Job Hunting Advice By Phone
For two days next week, job seekers will be able to get career advice directly from professional counselors at no charge. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST on December 27 and 28, counselors will accept calls from job seekers nationwide, answering questions and offering advice about the job hunting process.
The number is 312-422-5010. Job hunters can get more information about the call-in at firm’s website and blog.
This is the 26th year that the global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas will offer this free call-in service .
Salesforce Acquires Rypple
Rypple, the company that brought a social, collaborative networking approach to performance management, is being acquired by Salesforce.com. The CRM company announced last week that it was buying Toronto-based Rypple for an undisclosed amount. keep reading…
College hiring is about to ramp up again — and the very best college recruiting organizations would argue it ramped up several months back — so now is an opportune time to conduct an ROI analysis to determine when and where you should hire college grads instead of experienced hires. Understanding the unique competencies and skills that college students bring to a business is important not just in determining the number needed, but where to place them.
As a college professor and someone that advises firms on the design of college recruiting programs, I have come up with a long list of the advantages of hiring recent graduates. keep reading…
Recruiters and hiring managers love interviews. I have never been sure why that’s the case, but it seems to satisfy a human need for power and control. An interviewer has power to recommend for a job or not. Sometimes an interviewer has the power to actually make the hiring decision, and by holding a person’s economic future and career success in your hands, you can feel very powerful.
So anyone wielding such a powerful tool should be certain of its validity and of their skill in using it. The EEOC considers the interview to be a selection test, and requires that it be validated before use. Yet, I would guesstimate that few interviews are validated at all, and the ones that are may not be delivered consistently or by a competent, trained interviewer.
Research has consistently shown that the typical unstructured interview is pretty unreliable. It does not consistently ensure that the most qualified person gets a job or that the person will perform any better than another candidate chosen with less care. In all the studies that I have looked at, the validity of choosing candidates by only using an unstructured interview process is about the same as simply picking someone at random.
Interviews are rarely done consistently from interviewer to interviewer or from candidate to candidate. Yet, we typically consider all the interview inputs for a candidate as if they were done in the same way. Therefore we are comparing apples to oranges, and the hairs we split and the time we spend agonizing over a small detail or a particular answer to an interview question is wasted.
No wonder that candidates often roll their eyes at the absurdity of the interview process. keep reading…
College recruiting award-winner Ernst & Young is, like PwC, showing signs of better times.
It’s hiring about 9,000 students, including 5,200 from U.S. campuses, in the 2012 fiscal year, which began July 1, 2011. Those pre-recession levels cover the U.S., Canada, Israel, Mexico, and Central and South America. It’ll also use 3,900 interns, and double MBA hiring.
In the U.S., it expects to hire 3,000 grads for full-time jobs, and 2,200 interns.
The 141,000-person firm also:
- has a new internship program where interns spend four of the weeks of their internships abroad.
- is working with CampusLIVE. Later this month it will launch an ”Ernst & Young Challenge” on the site.
- is launching an new ad campaign this fall, using the tagline “See More” to encourage people to learn more about internships and jobs at Ernst & Young. Ads will run in school newspapers, wsj.com, businessweek.com, Pandora, CollegeRecruiter.com, Yahoo.com, and Experience.com.
A new study examines what some of the best internships have in common. A company called J-InterSect looked particularly at General Electric, Goldman Sachs, KPMG (builder of a new mobile app for career advice), Boston Consulting Group, and JP Morgan, honing in on what these firms do that others don’t, or what they do better than others.
At these benchmark companies, 84% of new hires were previously company interns. J-InterSect says that “at for-profit internships that failed to meet global benchmark standards, only 20% of new hires were previously their interns. For nonprofit internships, this metric is only 10%.”
The internship study involved interviews with internship program managers, a confidential 34-question questionnaire, and more, evaluating 75 internship programs. keep reading…
Source: Challenger, Gray & Christmas
More teenagers found summer jobs in June than at any time since 2007.
Global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas says June saw 785,000 16-19 year-olds hired. Last year, 457,000 teens got jobs in June.
Considering the summer hiring season for teenagers to be May through July, the two-month total of 785,000, well ahead of last year at this point, is shy of 2009′s 809,000. July’s numbers historically are about half of June’s. But last year, July’s hiring was almost as large as June’s, a consequence, perhaps, of employers wanting to be sure they had the customers to support the summer staff.
July’s numbers won’t be known until August 5th when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its next monthly employment report. So far, no one is making predictions about what it will show. The June report had the economy adding only 18,000 new jobs, a number that surprised even the most pessimistic economists. keep reading…
A California gaming-industry company whose value is “fire” is holding a contest to find coders to work for six weeks in July and August, saying “blow our minds while you’re here and we’ll hire you.”
IGN Entertainment says it doesn’t care if you’re flipping burgers or whether you went to Stanford or MIT. You just have to be legal to work in the U.S., 18 years old, and answer some really simple questions. For example:
- How many pennies could you put on the Golden Gate Bridge without any of them overlapping?
- Our images have a ratio of 16:9, and our design layouts have 12 pixel wide increments (there are no limits on height). Give examples of three image sizes that would have the correct ratio and would fit the design layout.
- What is the minimum number of moves required for a knight to cover the entire chess board? Write a program to prove it. Provide a graph with the move number on the x axis and the number of squares covered on the y axis.
- Creatively prove to us that you meet our value — Fire — that this would be more than just a job to you, and that you are passionate about us. keep reading…
