General Electric Co. will hire more college interns this year than all but three U.S. companies, according to a new report.
Fairfield-based GE is projected to take on 2,400 college interns in 2008 and 150 more who are pursuing master”™s degrees, according to CollegeGrad.com Inc., a State College, Pa., company that runs a career Web site.
Walgreen Co. is the runaway leader nationally with 7,350 slots, while Big Four accounting firms PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG and Ernst & Young round out the top five.
GE has opened up 50 additional undergraduate internships since 2007. The company will not have room to hire all of them ”“ in January CollegeGrad.com estimated the company will hire 1,500 college graduates this year.
Steve Canale, GE”™s manager of recruiting and staffing services, said GE has increased its emphasis on summer internships in the past decade as a way to recruit and vet prospective new hires, while lessening its use of cooperative work-study programs that last multiple semesters.
“From a company perspective, I prefer the 10-week internship,” Canale said. “We can find out what we need to know about them during that amount of time.”
Thomson Corp., which has 700 employees at its operational headquarters in Stamford, is the next-biggest locally based internship provider with 235 slots available this summer. The company is expanding its local recruiting, according to Jolie Chehadeh, who leads Thomson”™s campus intern recruiting program. For the first time last month, the company conducted internship interviews at Yale University”™s business school, offering five slots. Concurrently, Thomson met with Norwalk Community College officials about establishing internship and co-op programs.
Norwalk-based Xerox Corp., which plans to bring on 200 interns this year, has counted on its internship program to bolster its college recruiting program during a period of downsizing. As reported March 3 by the Fairfield County Business Journal, for the first time this decade Xerox increased the size of its work force last year.
For the first time this year, the company is offering 50 internships in sales at smaller offices across the country.
Joe Hammill, director of talent acquisition at Xerox, said he and other personnel colleagues are trying to get the company to make the internship program part of the company”™s strategic thinking ”“ for instance, using it to introduce software engineering students to the company to lay the rails for hiring up for a specific project expected to launch a few years out.
“Over the last four to five years, we”™ve been deliberately seeking to revitalize our college (recruitment) program,” Hammill said. “We haven”™t necessarily managed it in the best possible way until recent years. A lot of the time interns come in and they are seen as an extra set of hands. You know ”“ ”˜fetch this, fetch that.”™”
For the college student for whom an internship nevertheless represents but the first rung on a long slog up the corporate ladder, Xerox at least can offer living proof an internship can be a springboard to a stellar career at the company: Ursula Burns launched her own career as an intern there on her way to becoming Xerox president.
