HR HIGHS
Internship paves smooth way for a job
With attrition rates skyrocketing and qualified professionals constantly looking for greener pastures, there is a shortage of qualified employees. Herein steps the apprentice to salvage the situation. As a consequence, organisations are looking upon interns as potential employees. This is a paradigm shift by the human resources department, which used to earlier focus on employing experienced qualified professionals who could enhance the value of the organisation and contri
bute immensely to its growth. Now they are ready to take on interns with the right aptitude.
The reason for this change of view is the trend of experienced personnel demanding huge salaries and still jumping ship if they are offered higher salaries. This has increased attrition levels considerably and put companies on red alert.
Owing to such a retention crisis, companies are willing to hire young, inexperienced professionals in the hope they will stick on while learning on the job. The fallout is that interns are no longer considered temporary, transitory employees who will work for a few months and leave.
Companies have begun to extend the period of internship in order to take advantage of this readily available talent. Summer internship programmes have now turned to all year internships. These interns especially the talented ones are given training and exposure. When they prove their mettle, they are absorbed into the organisation. Organisations no longer treat interns as unwanted liabilities. They rather consider them as a viable alternative to hiring new employees, which may mean going through the entire recruiting and training process repeatedly. Interns are anyway under training and when they show potential and an inclination to work for the organisation, they are welcomed with open arms.
Internships can help managers decipher if the apprentice has the right qualities required by the company. Also, it helps the management road test these interns for permanent positions. Once the decision to hire them is taken, they can be moulded to fit the company’s requirements.
During the internship, these apprentices go through the rigours of the job as much as permanent employees and they learn about the company’s functioning in the process and also know what to expect when hired permanently. The employer on his side will start trusting these interns and soon offer them a permanent job.
Freshers are given the same training as entry-level employees and then the best are chosen for permanent jobs. Employers do everything to make the internship a pleasant experience for students because as Marty Barrett, an analyst at a boutique management consulting firm in Boston says, "One of the big goals is that you hope these people like the internship well enough that, unless they botch it up in some way, they get an offer when they graduate." He further adds, “Interns are buttered up in a lot of different ways, by the events that they’re taken to, by the way they’re not crushed with work. Most know that they’re getting wined and dined in the hope that they’ll have a positive impression of the place and want to join it."
Interns can be a readily available source that employers can tap into when they face an employee crunch. With companies going all out to woo internees to make them permanent, loyal employees, the whole process of internship becomes a win-win proposition for both the parties.
