6 ways to hire more diverse students for internships

Despite conventional wisdom, there is ample evidence to demonstrate the most college students and recent graduates are hired by large companies, not small employers.

By necessity, the more hiring that an employer does, the more that employer needs a strategy to successfully recruit its employees and that strategy, inevitably, will include diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. It is sometimes said that the three R’s of an internship program are recruitment, recruitment, and recruitment. In other words, your internship program fails to achieve its strategic goals unless it converts the students into entry-level employees upon graduation. And without diversity, any recruitment program fails. Why? Because study after study after study prove that the more diverse a workforce is, the more productive that workforce is.

So, let’s say that you’re like the vast majority of employers this year in that you’re not worried about receiving enough well-qualified applications for your internships. Instead, you’re worried about receiving enough well-qualified applications from diverse students for your internships. What can you do to ensure that you’ll be able to hire diverse students for your internships?

1. Reach and then engage with diverse students early. By “early”, I’m not talking about participating in virtual career events or advertising your internship and other job openings in the fall instead of the winter. Instead, I’m talking about planting seeds: partner with high schools and colleges to reach diverse students before they lock into majors and, therefore, largely limit their career paths. Offer job shadowing opportunities, fellowship programs, and speak to the students about the opportunities your organization and industry offer to them.
2. Pay your interns. Unpaid internships are illegal. Unpaid internships harm diverse students. And unpaid internships are bad for society. Don’t know what to pay? No problem. Run some searches on CollegeRecruiter.com to find a similar employer in your area that is offering a similar job to what you are hiring for. Every job on our site includes salary information provided by the employer or estimates for the salary.
3. Attend diversity career events instead of just career events that target all students. This year, due to the pandemic, it isn’t feasible to attend in-person career events either on-campus or off-campus, but it has become easier than ever to attend virtual career events. They’re proving to be great ways to engage with students who are already interested in working for you so if you’ve got a strong employment brand or they’ve already decided to apply to you, then you’ve got a great way to engage with them. But if your employment brand isn’t strong or you need to convince the student to apply to work with you, then you’re going to have to invest more into the top-of-the-funnel advertising solutions instead of going straight to career events, which are more of a middle-of-the-funnel recruiting tool.
4. Create scholarships for diverse students. One of the most talked about success stories is Etsy, which struggled for years to recruit and retain female software engineers. Finally, they created grants and public engineering courses for female engineering students. By the end of the school year, Etsy had increased the number of female engineers by 500 percent.
5. Instead of finding reasons not to hire international students, find reasons to hire international students. If your organization really believes in diversity, then it must believe in employing immigrants, whether they’re on visas that allow them to work for a temporary period upon graduation, the more permanent H1-B work visas, permanent residents, or any other lawful status. What could bring greater diversity to your workforce than, for example, a black, female, software engineering major who grew up in Kenya? After all, to paraphrase the hit musical Hamilton, immigrants get the job done.
6. Design your internship program so that it is flexible as that flexibility will allow highly sought-after non-traditional students to participate and non-traditional students are far more likely to be diverse than those who follow the more traditional career path. That flexibility should be during the application, interviewing, onboarding, and employment stages. It does little good to offer flexible working hours if you’ve already excluded the candidates who would have been interested in that benefit. Likewise, it does little good to offer remote interviewing options if you won’t allow those same people to work remotely.