Running an internship program for your company is an excellent way to create future talent pipelines. As you scale your program, you may need to invest in tools that can automate routine tasks and make the recruitment process more efficient. Internship tools help improve the candidate experience, which is a key proposition for attracting Gen Zer candidates.
In this blog post, we will review some top tools leveraged by successful internship programs today:
1. RippleMatch
RippleMatch is an all-in-one early-career recruiting platform that helps employers recruit their future talents with ease and efficiency. This platform enables employers to source the most suitable candidates for open roles and removes the time-intensive work that goes into building diverse, high-performing teams.
Essentially, RippleMatch’s suite of products allows companies to build relationships with promising internship candidates through the following capabilities:
- DEI: Achieve organizational DEI goals with access to a broad talent pool.
- Automation: Automate routine tasks and free up time to focus on other strategic activities.
- Data-driven decision-making: Make better decisions about recruitment with the analytics dashboard, and pinpoint areas for improvement to avoid losing key talent in the recruitment funnel.
2. GEM
GEM is a talent management platform that uses data and automation to help companies ace the recruiting process. The platform simplifies workflows and provides the data you need to enhance talent outreach, understand your talent pipeline, and foster relationships with top talent.
With its friendly interface, GEM helps recruiters, business leaders, and hiring managers collaborate effectively across the entire recruitment process. Key capabilities of this platform include:
- Data-driven decision-making: Gain actionable insights into the recruitment process with real-time analytics.
- Talent engagement: Keep talent warm by sending event invitations, thought leadership content, and engaging videos.
- Talent sourcing: Attract outstanding candidates from various channels such as social networks, talent communities, and past applicants.
- DEI: Track gender, race, and ethnicity metrics through the entire hiring channel, enabling employers to meet diversity goals.
- Forecasting: Determine how many hires are on course to onboard and resources the company requires to meet hiring goals.
3. Gather.Town
Gather is a video chat platform designed to make virtual interactions more human. They do this by building the Metaverse, a virtual layer over the physical world where people can work, socialize, and learn. Building a sense of community amongst interns is challenging in the case of remote internships. Gather makes it easy to create an engaging space for remote and hybrid interns where they can collaborate and connect with each other. If you are running an internship program, Gather enables remote collaboration in one place, making it easy to assign tasks to interns without the need to send links or files. The platform also enables teams to brainstorm ideas using whiteboards and keep conversations active, enhancing team engagement.
4. Criteria
Criteria helps employers make evidence-based talent decisions that both reduce bias and drive better outcomes for their teams. The platform presumes that the traditional hiring process introduces a lot of biases in recruitment, and employers require better methods of assessing talent.
Criteria uses personality assessments to enable candidates from all backgrounds to excel by focusing on attributes that can accurately predict job performance. The candidates can take the assessment from any location, making it convenient for both students and recruiters who cannot easily travel long distances.
5. Workday
Workday is a cloud-based human resources management program that can be integrated with different business programs. It enables businesses to manage every aspect of their workforce in a single location, such as hiring, onboarding procedures, performance management, and compensation schemes. Workday incorporates solutions such as tracking time, payroll, and analytics, enabling you to visualize HR management. Companies running internship programs can use Workday to source for candidates, screen them, and hire the ones that are the best fit for their needs. When you onboard interns, Workday allows you to monitor their performance, which is key in making informed decisions such as whether to give FTE offers to your interns.
6. OverDrive
OverDrive, Inc. is a digital distributor of eBooks, audiobooks, online magazines, and streaming video titles. The tool partners with public libraries and schools where readers can access various reading resources. Overdrive can help you share key resources with your interns to keep them engaged and interested. One company that has successfully used this tool is Robinhood, the financial services company. Robinhood’s mentors recommended several books that would be beneficial for interns to get their hands on. For this purpose, Robinhood leveraged Overdrive to give interns access to these books either in the form of audio books or digital copies during the internship period.
7. Symba
Symba is an all-in-one platform that allows you to streamline your intern program from onboarding to offboarding. The platform consolidates onboarding resources, making the process faster and seamless. Symba consolidates management and data analytics and helps reduce administrative inefficiencies, such as the need for back-and-forth communication. By creating a central resource hub for your interns, the platform saves numerous man-hours of manual work, time that can be channeled to other important tasks.
Symba enables users to foster community engagement by bringing together interns, intern managers, and other program participants. These participants can interact, engage in discussions, exchange messages, perform skill searches, and collaborate on projects they are working on. If you are also looking to improve your internship program's DEI metrics, Symba makes this easy by visualizing program representation, enabling you to know where the program is doing well or falling short. The platform allows you to access a broader pool of interns, thereby building a more diverse and inclusive internship program. You can also share resources such as videos to improve participants' knowledge of DEI topics.
Final Words
These tools can allow your internship program to target the right candidates, track intern performance, build an effective intern community, and ultimately increase intern conversion rates. While not an exhaustive list, the above tools provide a starting point for companies looking to enhance their internship programs.
