Provide a meaningful experience
A lot of people think of fetching coffee and spending hours standing at the copier when the word internship comes up, but McDonnough cautions that you can’t have this if you want to have a successful internship program.
“What you wouldn’t want to have happen is somebody to come full time and be surprised by the culture, the workload, the work requirements — the work,” he says. “You just want to avoid that, so it’s really important that they get a real experience during their internships, and that includes work demands, deadline demands, etc., that would be a normal course when they start with us. It would not be a good use of their time to make coffee and copies. That would be a wasted experience for an intern.”
So if you don’t want to waste your interns’ experience, how do you set up a meaningful one?
“A key of a successful internship program is making sure that they have opportunities to work on clients,” McDonnough says.
To do that, E&Y elects to have its internship program not during its slower summer months when most college students intern but during the first couple of months of the year — or the busy season.
Now doing this also goes back to having successful relationships with the college campuses who will work with both students and the firm to make this happen.
“It’s really because of the accommodations with the schools here in Texas,” McDonnough says. “It’s critical that you get the schools that you’re recruiting at to agree to that kind of time frame for the internships.”
If you don’t have interns when you’re busiest, then you run the risk of them not having enough work to do and not learning.
“Yes, it’s a great opportunity to know the firm and to know you, and you get some sense of what it means to go to work every day and what kind of firm you’re going to be working for, but it’s not as true of an experience of what the work life will be like the rest of the year,” he says.
Once interns start, they go through orientation for approximately three days, which is led by either a staff volunteer or someone from the recruiting team. That orientation is followed by more technical training, and just a couple of weeks into an eight-week internship, they’re ready to start in the field.
“Try to get them different experiences with different people,” McDonnough says. “We like for them to work on a couple different engagements in a couple different industry groups. When they move within the engagements, we try to get them to work with different people. It’s important because it gives us a couple different touch points on how they’re doing — not just one touch point — and secondly, it gives them an opportunity to experience different leadership styles.
“The leadership style we develop is based on the experiences that we all had in working for other people. This is just an opportunity for them to see some different leadership styles and personalities and grow in their personal development.”
Each engagement could involve as few as three people or as many as 15 or 20 people, so the interns have the opportunity to work with many people.
In addition to the engagements, each intern is paired up with a counselor or buddy during his or her time at the firm.
“That’s important so they have another reach-out point of someone that they know and have a chance to dialogue with,” he says.
Lastly, they also have a contact in HR, who is involved in running the overall program. This gives them at least three points of contact internally during their experience, but it also gives you the chance to have several points of evaluation.
“For every engagement they work on, they’ll get feedback from the person that’s above them on their performance and what they can do well and what they can do better,” he says.
Most of the people who intern at E&Y are juniors and will receive a full-time job offer at the end of their eight weeks, contingent on them maintaining their grades through the last two years of their five-year program.
“We’ll do an evaluation before they leave based on the feedback they had on their engagements, but because of the amount of work that we do before we bring somebody in in making sure we believe they’re a good fit, we’re seldom surprised if someone doesn’t live up to the performance standards of the firm.”
This process allows the student to focus on school, knowing he or she has a job upon graduation, and it takes the guesswork out of E&Y’s hiring. It’s also made E&Y a standout employer.
“One of the things that is a good indication of how well we’ve done in the recruiting process … is that we have been now ranked in the top three in Business Week’s list of best U.S. employers for new college graduates,” McDonnough says. “The list came out in September 2009, so it made us feel good, and it validated all the hard work that I have just talked about, about the importance of spending time on campus and finding those opportunities.”
How to reach: Ernst & Young LLP, (214) 969-8000, (214) 979-1700, (817) 335-1900 or www.ey.com
