As thousands of students begin their summer migration to corporate campuses to serve as interns, two possible fates await them:

The interns may find they are driven hard to learn the business and to accomplish real results, while earning the respect of their managers and accumulating valuable impressions of the firm’s executive team. Conversely, interns may end up making the coffee, fiddling with back-burner projects, fending for themselves in an unfamiliar city and otherwise learning how dispensable they are to the organization.

In reality, the latter fate is all too common. Even among major corporations, “internship programs are incredibly inconsistent in terms of quality,” says Steven Rothberg, president of CollegeRecruiter.com in Minneapolis. “You hear all the time about investment banking houses sending their interns to the mailroom for three months.”

That doesn’t bode well for human resources departments, which have a keen interest in internship programs: recruitment. “Bringing in students directly from college is key to having a good, sustainable pipeline of employment,” says Lonnie Pacelli, a human resources consultant in Sammamish, Wash., who oversaw internship programs while he was a manager at Microsoft and Accenture.

But some companies shy away from making the investments that a robust internship program requires, including the interns’ pay and perks, their supervisors’ time, and facilities costs and other overhead. Advocates of internships counter that these expenses shouldn’t be considered in a vacuum, but rather relative to the costs of other modes of recruitment, which can run to tens of thousands of dollars for candidates with senior management potential.

Without Internships, Employers Miss the Cream of the College Crop.

Internships are a powerful recruitment engine indeed. Employers make offers of full-time employment to 58 percent of students who serve as interns within their organizations, according to the 2004 Experiential Education Survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. And these offers that follow internships boast an impressive conversion rate; nearly 78 percent of them are accepted.

With internships so common these days, HR executives need to show hiring managers that if they don’t connect with college students before they’re seniors, the entry-level recruitment pool is already picked over. “Most of AOL’s entry-level hiring is done through our internship programs,” according to an explanation on the company’s Web site.

The recruitment potential of internships isn’t just about the numbers. Student internships are also a means of reaching out to sought-after diverse students who show much promise. Time Warner Cable’s STARS internship program, for example, specifically targets these potential recruits, tempting college and even high-school students with mentoring in the entertainment, media and telecom industries.

Human Resources Should Orient Interns and Oversee Firm-Wide Training.

When student interns head for their temporary cubicles, HR’s first job is to provide support for this next generation of potential recruits.

“Our job is getting the interns to that first day, and through the first week of training,” says Blane Ruschak, national director of university relations for KPMG in New York City. Internships are a major recruitment program at KPMG, where about 1,000 students converge for national training on one day in June.

As a public accounting firm, KPMG’s operations are heavily regulated. So, training is critical, whether the trainees are interns or new hires. “Interns go through firm-wide training and risk-management training, so they understand what rules they’re bound by,” says Ruschak, whose group reports to human resources.

Interns Can’t Thrive Without Demanding and Meaningful Work.

Beyond those first days, HR plays a critical part in ensuring that interns are given important work and have someone to turn to if issues arise. “HR’s role should be – and often isn’t – to educate hiring managers” about how important it is for the company to make a positive and powerful impression on interns, says Rothberg.

“HR needs to put guidelines in place,” says Pacelli. “Interns aren’t there at managers’ disposal; they’re there to make an assessment of whether to spend a career at the company.” To maximize the benefits of the internship for all parties, students should work side-by-side with full-timers doing the same job, he adds. Internships organized around “special projects” often look like make-work, and sometimes are.

“We make sure our interns serve on client engagements,” says Ruschak of KPMG. Students in the firm’s internship program typically are assigned to two or three audit, tax or advisory clients.

Hiring managers who want to foster ongoing relationships with best-and-brightest interns need to consider the value of the summer experience from the student’s point of view.

“Student interns tend to make more of an impact more quickly than employers expect,” says Philip Meade, internship coordinator for Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. “An intern who ends up sitting around a lot will be concerned about having a hole in his resume because he didn’t accomplish much.”

What Students Should Take Away from Their Internships.

At summer’s end, the best potential recruits will remember more about the substance of the internship than its style, observers say. “It’s not about impressing students by taking them to a luxury box at the ball game,” says Rothberg. “It’s about turning them on to the work.”

Still, savvy firms, even industry leaders, find ways to endear themselves to the top student performers. Microsoft gives its summer interns a round-trip plane ticket, provides a health club membership and pays for outside training seminars. Nearly 58 percent of employers responding to the NACE survey provide housing assistance to their interns.

-- Courtesy of Workforce Insights. Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. Written by John Rossheim, a journalist in Providence, RI. He writes about workplace issues, employment trends and changing relationships between employers and workers.