In today’s highly competitive job market, it’s important to maintain a full pipeline of top talent. Ensuring diversity is a key way to widen that pool of talent, as well as cultivate innovation and expansion.
In order to build a foundation of inclusivity, diversity hiring initiatives must start with your internship program. Internship program diversity is a great way to ensure you have a full bench of potential campus hires who come from a wide range of backgrounds. So, how do you diversify your intern talent pipeline?
First and foremost, you must consider recruiting from outside the city your company operates in. If you want to have a diverse intern class, it’s important to recruit from a variety of universities and colleges across the country.
However, this means you must consider the cost of an internship. Not only to you, as the employer, but to the actual intern. Think about it, interns are either in school (or fresh out of it), and do not have a main source of income. Paid internship opportunities are a great way for students to help cover the cost of tuition. However, if the intern has to temporarily relocate for the job, the paycheck may not be enough to cover the cost of moving and living in a new city—let alone the cost of tuition. Therefore, only a specific group of students can afford to accept an internship offer that requires them to relocate, and this can have serious implications to your internship program diversity.
So what can companies do to combat this? Provide temporary housing to your interns.
As mentioned earlier, great internship programs recruit people from all across the country (and in some cases, the globe), which means these intern classes need to find short-term housing, and in most cases, furnished short-term housing.
Many companies will provide a housing stipend for their interns, which can help cover some of the costs. However, trying to find housing is just as much of a challenge for interns as paying for it! This especially rings true when you consider cities with highly competitive housing markets like San Francisco, Boston or New York, or smaller towns with few renting options.
If companies find, secure and pay for their interns’ housing, they open the door for a wider range of potential candidates to accept the internship offer. Additionally, one UrbanBound client found an increase in the the number of women who accepted their internship offer once they started to provide subsidized housing.