Offering internship programs is an excellent way of tapping into talent, evaluating potential, and gaining diverse perspectives from early career professionals. Internships also come with costs such as wages, recruitment and onboarding costs, time spent on training and mentoring, and more.
The time and money spent on an internship program can be significant, so it is important that your company sees a return on its investment. The ROI depends on a company’s stated objectives and the integrity of its data. Establishing a framework for assessing the success of an internship program is important to get and sustain leadership buy-in for the program.
Here are some key metrics you can use to calculate ROI on your internship program:
1. Cost of Intern Hire
This metric measures how much it costs the company to hire an intern, as opposed to an industry hire. To calculate the cost of a hire, tally up all of your expenses and divide them by the total number of hires. For instance, if the company spends $30,000 to hire 6 interns, the cost per hire would be $5,000 per hire. If you are using various job search platforms, you can also calculate the cost per hire on each platform. This allows you to determine which platforms are the most cost-effective (keep in mind that cost is not the only factor in determining the success of a hiring platform).
Cost-per-hire is a crucial metric for assessing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the hiring process. This metric enables companies to obtain actionable hiring insights of what works and what does not. However, this metric on its own is not the most effective in calculating ROI; it should be compared to the cost of an industry hire. Your company should use cost-per-hire to track how much it cost to hire an intern that converted to full-time versus how much it would have cost to go out and source the role outside of an internship. This can also be translated into success planning. If you have hired an intern full-time and they stay and get promoted to senior or managerial positions, your company is able to save on recruiting costs.
2. Offer and Acceptance Rates
These metrics measure the number of interns offered full-time positions in your company and the percentage of interns who accept your offer. For example, if you have 10 interns over a certain period and offer full-time positions to 5, your offer rate is at 50%. If 3 of those interns accept the offer, your acceptance rate is 60%.
A low offer rate can indicate a variety of things: you may not be recruiting the right interns from the start, your interns may need more feedback and guidance to be prepared for full-time positions, or you’re bringing on way more interns than you plan on hiring full-time.
Your acceptance rate shows how competitive and appealing these offers are to your interns as well as brand affinity and company culture alignment. To determine how successfully interns are converting, you must know both your offer and acceptance rates.
3. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of eligible interns that have accepted offers. It is important to calculate this metric using the number of eligible interns and not all interns. Conversion rate is one of the most common benchmarks for internship program success.
According to NACE’s 2021 Internship & Co-op Survey Report, the average conversion rate in 2021 was 66.4% up from 55.5% the previous year. However, keep in mind that conversion rates can fluctuate across industries. A high conversion rate is a sign of the quality of your internship program and can be a useful strategy for attracting interns and enhancing leadership support for the internship program. Low conversion rates may inform the company to improve the candidate's experience and benefits package.
4. Renege Rate
You should track two different renege rates: candidates who accept an internship offer and then decline, and alumni interns who accept a full-time offer, but turn it down later. Knowing why candidates renege enables a company to review their recruitment and onboarding processes to discover potential pain points. This might include poor engagement with the candidates, an unsatisfactory onboarding process, or candidates receiving better offers from competitors.
Developing a keep warm strategy can enable you to keep your interns engaged until their reporting day. If you’re facing a high renege rate, download Symba’s Keep Warm Checklist today to find out how to keep your alumni interns warm and interested.
5. Net Promoter Score
Measuring net promoter score is a great way to assess internship program satisfaction. NPS uses one simple question to measure this experience: how likely are you to recommend interning at <Your Company Name>? Interns give a rating on a scale of 0, not likely to recommend, to 10, highly likely to recommend.
You can use NPS to assess if your interns are likely to refer other students to your program. A score of between 0-6 shows interns are unlikely to recommend, 7-8 shows passiveness, while a score of 9-10 indicates enthusiastic interns who are extremely likely to recommend the company as a place of work. NPS can provide a high-level insight into the overall intern experience in your company and should be measured at least at the midpoint and end of your program.
6. Promotion Rate and Time to Band
A metric to help you understand long-term ROI of internship programs is promotion rate. You’ll want to measure how many former interns get promoted versus industry new grad hires in the same class and also how quickly it took former interns to get to the next salary band. This will help you assess how well you're preparing your interns for success in their full-time roles.
7. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Metrics
For many organizations, internship programs are a powerful and purposeful pipeline for diverse talent, making them a key component to their DEI strategies. Tracking DEI metrics such as demographics allows companies to understand who their internship programs reach, attract, and convert.
Conducting regular surveys over the course of an internship program can help you determine how inclusive your program is. Program managers, mentors, and interns can provide key insights into how the program structure promotes or derails diversity, equity, and inclusivity.
To help you measure the success of your internship program, we developed a workbook with sample surveys and spreadsheets you can use to track and measure key program metrics, including NPS scores, conversion rates, and more. Get the Key Metrics workbook here.
For more tips and resources on early talent programs, leverage Symba’s Resource Center and schedule a demo today.
