Wall Street Journal Internship Survey States: Businesses Relying More on Interns, Scouting New Hires As Early as Freshman Year

wsj.com:

As companies start to rely more heavily on their internship pools to make full-time hires, they’re looking for ways to better evaluate candidates and targeting younger students.

A quarter of the nearly 480 respondents to The Wall Street Journal’s survey of college recruiters said more than 50% of their new-graduate hires had been interns at their companies; 14% said more than 75% were.

The trend toward intern-pool hiring has come on very strong in the past three to five years, according to Monica Wilson, acting co-director of career services at Dartmouth College. “Internship recruiting will largely replace entry-level recruiting in the next few years,” she says.

Firms are targeting and tracking students as early as freshman year, and undergraduates are exposed to corporate presentations and meet-and-greets within weeks of arriving on campus. Accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example, holds information sessions almost as soon as classes start and makes internship offers to rising juniors and seniors as early as the last week of September.

Read the whole story: wsj.com