What Unpaid Internships Say About Your Company
With the arrival of Spring, the quest for a resume-burnishing internship moves into high gear for many college students. A high proportion of those interns will work for free.
Obviously that’s not ideal for the interns, and, as The New York Times reports, it’s also a matter of concern to the US Department of Labor. DOL Solicitor Patricia Smith suspects that too many employers take advantage of students’ hunger for experience to avoid making paid hires. Newsweekly Time also notes a rise of non-traditional internships (among post-graduates changing careers), which it casts in the stark terms of supply and demand.
As an employer, how should you size up the situation? My research suggests that, even if you think you’re acting responsibly, you may not be seeing the whole picture. You may think your unpaid internship program says good things about you: that you’re willing to mentor, that you’re a canny test-driver of talent, and that you’re cost-conscious. At the very least, with so many young people willing to work for no pay, parents willing to support them, and schools willing to grant academic credit for the experience, you may think you’re within your rights.
But to the outside world, your internship program might say some very different things about you:
Your internship program doesn’t have to say bad things about you. A way to make sure it doesn’t is to pay your interns a decent wage. Full stop. But even unpaid programs — and occasionally there’s a case to be made for them, if they mean that more opportunities are created — can shine, if they’re designed to provide valuable experience and serious mentoring. A two-month job that maps to a two-month project, for example, serves everyone better than a random assignment to pitch in as some department limps through vacation season.
Your human resources department knows how to craft positions that add value on both sides of the equation — it does this every day with the full-time roles needed to make the business successful. Devote the same level of reflection to your internship roles, and they can reflect well on you.
Ross Perlin is at work on a book on the internship phenomenon. A former unpaid intern himself, he is now gainfully employed by the Himalayan Languages Project in southwest China.
What Unpaid Internships Say About Your Company
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