Intern Hell Week: When Summer Programming and Fall Recruitment Planning Overlap

When you work as a campus recruiter, you are expected to juggle many responsibilities at once. When I managed the internship program for a Fortune 500 company, I was responsible for both the recruitment cycle and summer programming. Currently I work at RippleMatch, a tech platform that supports companies in virtual and diversity recruitment for early career roles. I’ve spoken to a number of talent professionals who manage the internship programs at their companies, and many of them are in the same position that I was in–small team, mounting responsibilities, and the need to stay one step ahead of the campus recruitment cycle to prepare for the following year.

From what I remember, the last week prior to our interns’ start date in May reminded me of “hell week” from my high school musical theater days. Very long hours, a lot of things going wrong, and tensions RISING. I have a traumatic memory of a fight over folding chairs that was escalated all the way up to the office of the CEO. I wish I was kidding. But that’s the vibe of this time of year, whether you’re onsite or remote. And once that infamous week is over, and you’ve escaped orientation with your life and dignity intact, chased every hiring manager down for I9s, and miraculously gotten everyone logged in to their laptops, what’s next? 

For me, the first sign that it was summer (aside from my inbox being flooded with questions from the interns) was realizing I had to collect all of the internship requests from the business before fall recruitment started. As most campus recruiters know, this process is ultimately what will determine the success of your program. If a hiring manager wants an intern for the following summer, and doesn’t let you know ahead of time, you will be scrambling in the spring to find someone. Needless to say this leads to a lot of wasted effort and a struggle to find strong talent. That can also reflect poorly on your campus recruitment team, and affect the reputation of your program and volume of requests for years to come.

At my former company, we had a pretty simple mechanism for sending out internship requests. We sent out an email in July with explicit instructions to submit requests by September 1st. There were some serious flaws in this process, the main one being that we had to rely on busy senior leaders to remember to respond to our email. Aside from BCC follow-up emails, we didn’t have a system in place to help them, or to field their various questions efficiently.

In the interest of learning about better solutions, I spoke to some colleagues of mine who manage campus recruitment at their organizations. Megan, Talent Acquisition Manager at Daily Harvest, shared their strategy with me: 

"At Daily Harvest, we believe in creating fair, equitable, and robust programs that give our interns a real seat at the table...

Heading into the fiscal year, we partner with each team across the organization to align on goals and projects to determine headcount per semester. It’s our job to ensure there is consistent, enriching work and enough bandwidth to create an optimal learning atmosphere. Equally important, we compensate all interns equally to create a fair program and remove any uncertainty around the budget.”

I really liked the idea of combining intern allotment with fiscal budgeting. At my previous company, one of the issues we ran into when soliciting intern requests was a lack of clarity around budget on certain teams. Megan’s method would require 

• Understanding your fiscal budgeting cycle and approaching teams well in advance of those conversations. For most companies, this would mean starting those conversations much earlier in the year.
• Having details such as salary, stipends, and relocation set in stone before approaching other teams in the business.

Another talent professional, Dru Hartshorn, the Senior People Acquisition Leader at rPeople Staffing, approaches the upcoming internship by encouraging managers to be project-focused: 

“One way I like to engage managers about upcoming internship program planning is to start by asking them to share with me the projects they wish they had time to work on, but just can't get to right now.  Is it an idea that was generated during a recent Hackathon or a personal project they've been dreaming about that ties into solving a customer need?  Once we have a vision for the scope of the work to be done, it's much easier to plan the hiring needs from there by outlining how many engineers, product managers, and even marketing specialists we will need to complete the project. “

Dru’s collaborative approach to internship need planning is incredibly thoughtful–it encourages managers to think through potential uses for an intern on their team. This allows them to build a strong business case for budget, as well as create a strong programmatic structure for the incoming hires. Dru’s method would require

• The bandwidth to facilitate these conversations with hiring managers, or a creative way of doing so–for example, a Google Form or similar submission to record responses could help make the process more efficient.
• Industry and company knowledge–it would be helpful to be able to advise managers on what their headcount would need to be for each potential project.

My conversations with Megan and Dru gave me some new perspectives on facilitating conversations around internship requests. Rather than a transactional exchange of requests and candidate delivery, internship requests should be a collaborative process that involves both the manager and the recruiter. This would create further clarity around both process and planning, and would improve the overall quality of the internship program.

As those of us in the talent field know, the scope of how we manage these processes is changing. As we explHore technologies and practices that allow us to be more accurate and efficient in our recruitment and program management, we are able to set the stage for summer internships to have a greater impact on the business as a whole. By refining the way that we do our job, we leave more room to focus on things like DEI goals, and creating a more purposeful experience for these hires. After all, intern classes represent the company’s future–and our efforts around recruitment and programming should reflect that.