Internships | TalentEgg Trends

Tag: Internships (page 3 of 4)

Conference recap: How To Start A Successful Internship Program by Just-Eat.ca’s Antonio da Luz and Jane Mai

With a labour shortage looming and the competition for top talent already fierce, one trend we’re seeing more and more of is employers using internship and co-op programs as feeders for entry level roles.

Students seem to like it too – it acts like an extended interview process for both the student and the employer.

It’s also how Just-Eat.ca, Canada’s largest and fastest-growing online restaurant/food order service, hired five of its full-time entry level employees this year.

Just-Eat’s Antonio da Luz and Jane Mai explained how they used TalentEgg to hire nine interns, exposed them to all areas of the business including Sales, Marketing, Operations and Finance, and launched 11 significant intern-driven projects.

Gen Y Recruitment Insider: Behind the scenes with Kobi Gulersen at MasterCard Canada

July 7, 2011 / Cassandra Jowett / 4 Comments

Did you miss our Gen Y Recruitment Insider event last week? Don’t worry. We’ve summarized the top tips from our first two Gen Y Recruitment Insider presentations.

Yesterday we published the main messages from Nancy Moulday’s presentation, and today we’re egg-cited to bring you the key points from Kobi Gulersen’s presentation on the innovative MasterCard Canada summer intern campaign.

Kobi Gulersen, Director of Digital Marketing, MasterCard Canada

The project

For the first time, MasterCard Canada decided to hire summer interns. It made the job application process a contest, and the prize was employment. Students were required to use social media to submit a cover letter, résumé and the URL to an original online creative component (video, photo, website, etc.).

Recruitment from the marketing perspective

As a marketer, Kobi had a new take on the recruitment process. He approached the process like an ad campaign, selling the MasterCard brand to a social media savvy student audience.

Continue reading

Poll results: What is most important to students in a summer internship?

April 27, 2011 / Cassandra Jowett / 0 Comments

With many students soon starting their summer internships now that classes are over, we recently featured a poll on our homepage that asked:

What is most important to you in a summer internship?

You might think that “high pay” might be most important to students considering all the hype about student loans and unpaid internships these days, but it actually came in a distant second:

Only 20% said high pay was most important.

It turns out that “meaningful experience” tops earning big bucks:

Nearly two thirds of students (59%) said it was the most important thing to them in a summer internship.

The three other options each received a small share of the votes: 11% said the reputation of the employer was the most important; 6% chose mentorship as most important; and only 4% said a flexible schedule was most important to them in a summer internship.

Employers

Do these results mirror the strategies behind your summer internships? With the vast majority of students seeking meaningful experience during their summer internships, will you provide the experience they’re looking for? Or are you going a step further by offering meaningful experience AND high pay?

Let us know in the comments!

Students

What does “meaningful experience” mean to you, and is it what you would have chosen as most important?

Let us know in the comments!

Today we start a new poll on the homepage, asking: When did you or will you start searching for your first post-grad job? Click here to vote!

How to keep interns engaged and why it's important

February 16, 2011 / Nathaniel Rottenberg / 3 Comments

I’ve been an intern before. I’ve grabbed the coffees, cleaned the kitchen. I’ve even driven the boss’ car to pick someone up (didn’t mind that one). But on top of the trivial tasks, I also did some pretty meaningful work – tasks like writing proposals to attend conferences and making wicked presentations that were seen by hundreds of people. These tasks benefited the business and freed up other employees’ time.

Meaningless tasks are part of the intern life, but that’s okay as long as you get to do challenging and rewarding stuff too. If an intern is engaged and learning then they can be very productive and beneficial to your business.

Here’s why I think it’s important to keep interns engaged:

An engaged intern will achieve better results and free up your ‘real’ employees’ time, allowing them to do more important tasks.
Treating your interns poorly says a lot about your company culture. An intern may even write about how awful their experience was on their blog, and who wants to have to deal with the consequences of that? Far-fetched? Maybe. Impossible? No.
An engaged intern will be more likely to want to take an entry level position after they complete their internship. Hiring a former intern is less risky than hiring a complete stranger for an entry level position.

I’m guessing a lot of you who are reading this agree with the benefits of keeping interns engaged. The tricky part is how. Interns have no experience and require a lot of hand-holding which takes valuable time away from the employees who are responsible for managing them. Below are three ideas on how to keep interns engaged so you can free up your time and focus on your responsibilities:

Before you take on an intern, develop a project that they can focus on and run with. Let them know that this is their project and they are responsible for the results. This will make them feel more like a full-time employee and free up your time, too.
Challenge them. Assign them a task that’s beyond their skill level and ability and see what they come back with. It’s important to let them know that their assignment is beyond their abilities so as not to discourage them. Young people like a challenge, especially if they think it’s ‘cool’. And who knows, they may even come back with a great result. Bonus.
Tell them about a challenge that is facing the company or a certain department. Let them brainstorm ideas on how they would tackle the challenge. Not only is this a great way to engage them, they may also come up with some great ideas.

An engaged intern will be productive and eager to take on the menial tasks. If you’re going to have interns why not treat them as a potential employee and get them to be as productive as one?

Do you have interns at your company? How do you keep them engaged?

TalentEgg Trends

Today’s Talent, Tomorrow’s Leaders