Internships can be harder to score than jobs

The Future. The internship experience has been battered by the confluence of COVID, remote work policies, and a raft of mass layoffs. That’s made landing a good internship much harder to come by. But without bringing back robust internship programs, many firms may find themselves without a pool of qualified employees for entry-level positions.

Competitive disadvantage
Internships are paying better than they have… but are nearly impossible to land.

• A survey by recruiting startup RippleMatch found that almost half of Gen Zers are sending an average of 50 applications.
• Over 50% aren’t confident they’ll land the internship that they need or that will meet their standards — especially as listings are down almost 15%, per Indeed.
• And thanks to the rise of remote work, firms have a wider pool of applicants to choose from… even though most young people report that they would rather be in the office.

Aaron Terrazas, Glassdoor’s chief economist, told Bloomberg that internships were once “this special entry point to a top-tier workforce… but the pandemic really changed that. The internship experience has really eroded.”

That’s not to say that some companies aren’t trying to make them better. Hedge fund Citadel raised its intern salary to a whopping $120/hour. But good luck getting in. It only accepted 1% of 69,000 applications for their summer program this year.