Podcast
Podcast
- 18 Oct 2023
- Managing the Future of Work
Defining experience: How micro internships build skills and boost productivity
Joe Fuller: The path from college to career is anything but smooth. Academic records are generally poor indicators of job readiness, and relatively few students get substantial work experience or develop relevant skills in fields that interest them while at college. And traditional campus recruiting misses the mark for many students and employers. Little wonder that more than half of recent college graduates don’t last a year in their first job. What would a more sophisticated transition look like? Enter micro internships, short-term paid professional gig engagements. Students and recent grads can take on these short-term projects to gain valuable experience and demonstrate their skills to potential employers. Organizations expand their knowledge-work capacity and their recruiting reach. It’s a classic rent-to-own model from which both sides benefit. How does it work? What are those benefits? And what are the barriers to wider adoption?
Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. My guest today is Jeffrey Moss, Founder and CEO of Parker Dewey, a firm that has created a marketplace linking aspiring workers and potential employers through the mechanism of micro internships. We’ll talk about how those internships augment companies’ business and HR operations. We’ll look at the benefits for both sides of the transaction and how micro internships boost skills-based hiring and diversity. And we’ll also discuss how Parker Dewey coordinates with its more than 600 postsecondary education partners to enhance college-to-career transitions. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Moss: Thanks so much, Joe. I’m honored to be here.
Fuller: Tell us a little bit about how you came to start Parker Dewey. What’s your journey that’s brought you to this point in your career?
Moss: I was an investor in education and technology for about 15 years and really saw a lot of the challenges associated with college-to-career transitions—students who were smart, hardworking, had grit. But if they didn’t have the “right” academic pedigree, GPA, major, family connections, it was hard to land that job. But one of the other things I saw was that, when we were hiring for the firm I was at, we were often guilty of the same biases of so many other companies, focused on, again, those characteristics, which often don’t predict a great hire. They don’t predict who is actually the right fit. At the same time, I think about my own journey: I was a college student, I did a summer internship in public accounting at Coopers & Lybrand back when it existed and realized the first week of that summer internship, I didn’t want to be a public accountant. I figured that out after my junior year. I went back to school, had one data point of one thing I didn’t think I wanted to do, but had nothing to compare it to. What I realized was that the college-to-career transition process was really broken for students and companies alike. For students, how can they do that exploration to figure out what is the right pathway and to demonstrate skills beyond an academic transcript? And for companies, how can they more effectively identify and gauge and assess who is the right hire for that full-time role or that summer internship?
Fuller: So how is it that that led you to develop the micro internship model that Parker Dewey is known for?
Moss: Well, one of the things I realized—and actually a college student described it perfectly—was that the college-to-career process was very much asking students and employers to essentially get engaged through a summer internship or get married through a full-time role without ever actually having the opportunity to date. Her comment was, “I actually want to have a real experience with that company, something that I can really see what that job is like, beyond what I can learn from an info session or an informational interview.” At the same time, what we saw happening back in 2015 was the emergence of the gig economy—not the Ubers or the DoorDashes, but think the Upworks and the Fiverrs, where organizations were recognizing that professional projects can get done outside of the four walls of their organization. They were typically doing this for geographic arbitrage. The metaphorical light bulb went off and said, what if we applied this model to college-to-career, where every professional has these 10-, 20-, 30-hour short-term projects that arise that would be perfect for a college student, but they happen not to have a summer intern right now, or it’s the wrong time of year? Can we create a model where busy professionals can give these short-term projects to college students as a way for them to get work done, but at the same time to allow college students and employers to mutually assess fit, to learn about each other in a way that’s not captured from a transcript or from an interview? We tried to find organizations doing it, no one was. So, ultimately, we decided to launch Parker Dewey back in 2016.
Fuller: So maybe you could walk us through a prototypical engagement. How is the match made between an employer that’s prepared to engage one of your interns on a specific project? How long do they last? Do the interns get paid?
Moss: Sure. At the individual level, when we define micro internships, these are, again, short-term paid professional assignments—short-term, meaning these assignments that typically would take a college student or recent graduate, for that matter, 10 to 40 hours to complete and is due a few days to a few weeks out. So, very, very bite sized. By the way, when I say college student, that is very much all inclusive, whether it’s a two-year school, four-year school, master’s program, bootcamp, other nontraditional. These are 10- to 40-hour projects. They are typically done across any department within a company, whether it’s marketing, sales, operations, HR, finance, you name it. It’s the type of task that you would give to a college student or recent graduate and not be stressed about. So these aren’t projects that require access to highly sensitive information. So when we do work with Northrop Grumman, they’re providing public data and information that’s in the public domain, not confidential or top-secret information. Examples of projects might be within the marketing department—we need someone to research and draft a blog article on a given topic. Or we want to do a competitive analysis. In HR, it might be, we want to see how our job descriptions compare to those of other organizations in our space. Or we need to develop new best practices for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Let’s go find out what new content has come up. So all of these projects are ones that, again, don’t require onboarding, they are not bet-the-company assignments. For companies, one of the ways they think about this is the “we should” and “I shouldn’t” projects—those tasks that are, again, on someone’s to-do list saying, “We should really write this article, but we don’t have enough hours in the day.” Or “I shouldn’t be the one doing this data analysis and visualization. I’m an experienced professional with 20 years of experience. This is something that isn’t the highest and best use of my time.” Those are perfect micro internships for the students. Companies simply define the project—and we have a whole bunch of templates and best practices—but define the project, when they need it done. The college students or recent graduates see the description, the start date, the due date, how much they’ll be paid. If they’re interested, they raise their hand and apply. Then companies can select who they want to work on this project. While they have access to resumes and LinkedIn profiles and where the individual goes to school, they’re also seeing short-answer responses to questions they pose—questions like, “Why do you want to do this? Why should we select you? How would you approach this project? Describe your comfort using Power BI.” We found those short-answer questions are really key. They provide more insights than you would get from a resume and oftentimes allow students to showcase skills—or to be blunt, highlight some of the challenges. The student with the 3.9 GPA from a highly prestigious school might answer the question, “Why should we pick you?” with “I have some free time.” Or it might have typos because it hasn’t been scrubbed to perfection like a resume. That’s okay. That gives that employer a signal that that student might not be the right fit. But it also provides a learning opportunity for the student, versus the student who might come from a school that that company doesn’t historically recruit from, but has a really thoughtful, insightful answer. Let’s give that student a chance.
Fuller: Jeffrey, it seems like a lot does hang on a student’s performance for what could be a pretty short assignment, a 10-, 20-, 30-hour assignment, particularly for an underclassmen—let’s say a sophomore or a freshman, even, who hasn’t worked in a corporate setting on business problems. Seems like the stakes are pretty high. How much can an employer really gather from a micro internship?
Moss: Yeah. It’s a great question and is one of the things we were unsure of when we first launched the organization. First of all, we found the employers are well prepared to recognize that these are college students, whether it’s a freshman or a senior, and their expectations are set as such. The projects themselves are scoped in such a way also that college students can be successful on them. They don’t require 20 or 30 years of professional experience. The insights the companies get are around, not just the technical skills, but also things like communication, problem solving, et cetera. On the other side of it, we actually asked students what the benefit was for them, because one of the questions was, not just how much does a company get out of a 20- or 40-hour project, but how much does a student get? One of the things I’m most proud of is, over 90 percent of students who have completed micro internships report improvement or building of their confidence in things like communication, critical thinking, professionalism, technology, career and self-development. So these short-term projects really help the student hone those skills that the National Association of Colleges and Employers report are most important for employers when assessing new hires, but also build confidence, which is especially key for those students from populations underrepresented in the workforce.
Fuller: That also, of course, does something that’s great for a student, even if they don’t decide to pursue further work for a company or in an industry, which is they’ve not only learned through the work experience, but they’ve got something to put on their resume. They’ve got something to talk about in a job interview. That also, of course, helps prevent employers falling back on the types of proxy variables or variables they use to infer someone is capable, like a grade point average, like the selectivity of the school they went to, like their GPA. So anything that nominates the conversation about lived experience and one’s actual capacity and understanding of what it takes to be a successful employee certainly puts the conversation on both a firmer grounding but also on a fairer grounding—that you’re not relying on those inferential criteria that tend to favor certain populations or certain types of performance.
Moss: One hundred percent. I mean, that’s why skills-based hiring is being recognized as a more effective way to recruit, because the traditional signals don’t work. All Parker Dewey has done, all micro internships have done, is allow skills-based hiring to be used at the early-career phase, because again, for someone graduating from college, traditionally all an employer could look at was GPA, major, academic selectivity of the school, et cetera. Those are poor signals. Those are not predictive of who’s a good hire. What we’re doing, which benefits the students and the employers alike, is giving students an easy way to gain a series of those experiences so that employers can more effectively assess the skills using real data, as opposed to these non-predictive signals.
Fuller: So how do you connect with students? Is this something by word of mouth and they just sign up? Or are you going to career placement offices? Awfully hard to get the attention of 18- to 23-year-olds when they’re studying, going through the traditional search process, maybe rooting for their roommate’s varsity team or whatever else.
Moss: We actually do zero marketing to students, and we never have. Since day one, we have been an open platform that welcomes all college students, recent grads, et cetera, broadly defined. But we actually don’t allow colleges or universities to require it. What we found is, by giving students what they actually want—real paid professional experiences—you don’t have to “market” to them. So, for instance, we just wrapped up our annual student sentiment survey. Fifty percent of college students were not participating in career fairs. Almost 70 percent were not participating in info sessions, because what they said was, “I wasn’t finding value from it. I was getting the same information I could read from the company’s website. I would only attend an info session or visit a career fair booth if I already knew I wanted to apply.” In contrast, over 95 percent of the college students said what they really want are these micro internships, these short-term paid professional projects. We have partnerships with over 600 post-secondary institutions. We love collaborating with the schools, not just to ensure students are aware of this opportunity, but also to help the employers recognize the opportunity—employers who want to engage freshmen or sophomores to introduce their brand or their industry, employers that are looking to meet student athletes, employers that have open roles they’re trying to fill and are actively recruiting juniors and seniors. But students are hearing about us, certainly from their schools, from their peers, from their own research. The student who thought he or she wanted to work in investment banking might try a project for a consumer packaged goods company in finance, or might see there’s an opportunity doing corporate development within an emerging tech company. They’re willing to try that out as a project and can ultimately determine that that might be a better fit for them than going to Wall Street.
Fuller: When you engage a company and try to track them into your ecosystem so they’ll start posting opportunities for the individual students that you serve, what are the objections? What’s the pushback? We have certainly found that, in a lot of instances, human resources functions are pretty reluctant to try new things and pretty confident in the toolkits they’ve got. So I’m curious what your experience is in winning over a big, distinguished company like a Northrop Grumman, causing them to be an account.
Moss: For a lot of HR departments, they see this doesn’t need to replace what they’re already doing, even if they have very, very successful internship and full-time hiring programs. This approach helps them reach different student populations, schools that they may not be recruiting at. They see it helps them get through the noise. Students are overwhelmed by the volume of emails they’re getting from employers, from the number of on-campus events. The HR teams are trying to figure out, “How do we more effectively engage the students and then also effectively assess their skills, see them in action, to make sure that we’re bringing in the right folks?” They’re actually getting feedback from real hiring managers on how the students do when they’re completing these projects. That’s also key. The hiring managers, themselves, view this as a perk. For HR to be able to go to a hiring manager and say, “Hey, Joe, we know you have a lot of work on your plate. Here’s a resource where you can use college students to help get some of those things done. All we’re going to ask is, let us know how the student did on that project for you. If they did a great job, we’re going to prioritize them in campus recruiting.” In fact, one of the approaches we’ve seen a ton recently is the use of employee resource groups [ERGs] in this process, where HR is going to the ERGs and offering them micro internships as a resource, both to get the work done, but also to show the companies the commitment to creating truly equitable pathways into their organization. So they’re having members of the ERG, for instance, giving micro internships to students who go to HBCUs, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HSIs [Hispanic-Serving Institutions] or first-generation students, students from backgrounds similar to their own. The members of the ERG like it because they see the companies making that authentic commitment to diversity. But the students like it, as well. They’re actually engaging with individuals from backgrounds similar to their own. They feel a sense of inclusion in the company. They’re building these authentic relationships.
Fuller: So give us some sense, if you would, of the demographics of these relationships. Does a typical student do multiple micro internships over the course of their college career, or is it just a few? Do they tend to focus on, zero in on, a specific industry, or do they look broadly? Same for the other side of the equation, the employers. Do these programs get very widespread in companies, or do they stay pretty localized in a specific division or function?
Moss: We’ve seen it starting with individual professionals who will post their project on their own, pick a student, work with a student on a micro internship. Sometimes it leads to a full-time hire, sometimes it doesn’t. The way we’re structured, it’s easy for that individual professional to do it on his or her own, because, as the general counsel of a large bank said, “Think about it like going to Kinko’s.” The student is not the employee, not a contractor or a freelancer of that company. So even though they’re under an NDA, the company doesn’t deal with all of the HR burdens typically associated with it. So for that busy professional, they can post a project, get help on it, and it’s wonderful. When we’re seeing companies launch it more institutionally, if you will, what we typically see happening is, an organization will launch it with a specific department or team. They’ll try it out in the marketing and sales department, or they’ll try it out with an employee resource group to really prove the model. What’s interesting is, once that happens, it tends to propagate throughout the organization. So, for instance, one of the organizations we work with, Xylem, it’s a water technology company, Fortune 500 business that, to be blunt, a lot of college students hadn’t heard of before. Xylem initially piloted this with marketing and HR to really prove out the model and test it and see the efficacy. What’s happened is, that organization has since expanded it to corporate wide, because members of other teams were hearing about the micro internships, they were recognizing that, here’s a great opportunity to get help on those projects and also feel good that you’re giving a college student an opportunity. Also recognize that this can help you with the recruiting and hiring process, identifying potential future members of your team. So it really spread throughout the organization in almost a viral way, which was a good thing. We’re also seeing companies incorporating it into the campus recruiting process, itself. So, for instance, Smith and Nephew, a global medical device company, was using micro internships to recruit and hire individuals for the sales engineer role. How do we help students studying mechanical engineering or electrical engineering recognize opportunities that exist in business development? So they actually selected in one of their projects 23 different micro interns to do a business development project. Of the 23 who are delivering real work to members of the business development team, of the 23, they decided to interview 18. One of the students raised her hand and said, “You know what? This isn’t the right fit for me. I’m not going to interview for the full-time role.” That’s okay. That saves Smith and Nephew time. It saves the student’s time. Of the 17 who were ultimately interviewed, I think 13 turned into full-time hires. A year later, 100 percent of them are still there, including one who won an employee of the year award.
Fuller: So let’s talk about it from the student side, and also you mentioned in that example a pretty high convert rate in terms of engagement leading to full-time offers. Do you have a standard measure you’re shooting for there, a goal? Or what has your performance been in terms of one or one of a micro internship turning into an offer for a full-time employment post-graduation?
Moss: We keep track of a variety of statistics, including conversion rate. Some companies, what they’ll typically do is think about between two and three micro interns for every one summer internship or full-time offer or full-time hire they want to make. The average cost of each micro internship, about $300 or $400, if you think about even at the high end that three-to-one conversion—that suggests a $1,200 cost per hire. That compares incredibly favorably to the average reported by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which is over $6,100 for each full-time hire. Beyond the improved cost per hire, what we’ve also found is better diversity and retention. Over 80 percent of individuals who complete micro internships come from populations underrepresented in the workforce. When they are hired, 98 percent of them remain at the same company at least a year, versus 55 percent of recent college grads who leave their first job in the first year. So this drives lower cost per hire, better diversity, better conversion, better retention, while at the same time adding value for the busy professionals, allowing the existing employee team to be more efficient. From a student perspective, one of the things we’ve found is there’s no “right” way for the students to engage. We certainly see students doing one project, having a great experience, and it leading to a full-time offer or a full-time role. We don’t think that’s necessarily the best thing to happen though. We think the best case for the student is that he or she starts working on micro internships as early as freshman year, and during freshman and sophomore year begins that exploration process, starts to think through different industries, different types of roles, departments, if they like big companies or small companies. They can continue to use micro internships to home in on what is the best fit for them. That actually improve outcomes for both the student and the company alike. Because when companies are hiring students who have completed micro internships, the students don’t have that grass is greener issue. They’re not constantly wondering if that’s the right fit for them.
Fuller: Well, certainly one of the big hidden costs in the labor market, whether it’s for mid-career people, recent college graduates, people from technical schools, is mismatches. That it’s hugely expensive for companies—churn—where they’ve made those investments, brought somebody on board. Often when someone leaves abruptly or doesn’t work out, there are implications for things like overtime. Also frequently culture is damaged, team morale goes down. But it’s really a stiff penalty for the young worker when they have something, they make that first commitment, they’re coming out with a degree, and they end up on the wrong path. Our research indicates, if you get to age 28, 29, and you’ve knocked around between a couple of different career paths, you’re really not settled into something, you’ve done material damage to your prospects. It doesn’t mean you’re fated now to have a frustrating and disappointing career, but you’ve certainly made it harder on yourself. So, Jeffrey, you started the business¬¬, I believe you said, in 2016. You lived through a lot of change. There was a rapid growth of gig platforms in the meantime, so the same companies that are engaging your interns are using a Catalant, using an Upwork. Also, of course, you lived through Covid. So tell us about that journey chronologically, how your offer has changed, and how that reflected what you picked up over the course of time as you grew the company and had more experience supporting companies, hiring interns, and matching interns to companies.
Moss: The irony is, what we’re doing today has not changed at all from what the vision was back in 2016. We had always believed in this concept of using gigs—not as a replacement for full-time hires, or not individuals being on gig platforms forever, but gigs as a pathway. Gigs as a pathway for companies to hire, gigs as a pathway for college students and recent grads to determine what is the right path and, ultimately, launch their careers. So nothing has really changed in what we’re doing because of the Covid pandemic or other changes. What was impacted was really more openness by a lot of organizations to this concept of gig-based work, more open to remote work in general. The Covid pandemic allowed them to realize, “Okay. We can get work done outside of the four walls.” And it opened up the opportunity to really work with Parker Dewey. The other thing that’s been different is, I think we’re seeing a fundamental change in campus recruiting that was coming for a long time, anyway. Does it make sense to be attending 500 career fairs each year, just to hand out brochures and give the company pitch and collect resumes? Companies were recognizing the importance of looking beyond focus schools. Companies were recognizing that their investment in several tools, again blasting emails to students, wasn’t necessarily driving the ROI. What we’re seeing now is a fundamental shift away from some of those traditional recruiting methods toward more of the skills-based hiring approach that Parker Dewey is just a huge believer in.
Fuller: So, Jeffrey, where do you see Parker Dewey going? What are the unmet needs you see out there, given you’re in the marketplace regularly? Or how do you see deepening or enhancing your engagement with either employers or students?
Moss: As far as Parker Dewey’s evolution, it’s really going to be more of the same. I think the data speaks for itself. Since founding Parker Dewey in 2016, 96.1 percent of students who have completed micro internships are professionally employed upon graduation—96.1 percent—compared to 47 percent of recent college grads who are underemployed. On top of that, when they’re taking full-time roles, they’re sticking around. They’re not job hopping and leading them toward the permanent detour, if you will. They’re accepting roles eyes wide open, and they know it’s the right fit, which improves the outcomes both for them and for the companies that are hiring them. In addition, of the students who are completing these micro internships, over 80 percent come from populations underrepresented in the workforce. Looking at investments in the European Union, looking at HR data analysis, looking at finance technology, we think micro internships should be a core part of that campus recruiting. When I look forward, it’s really about continuing to spread that word, helping more of the campus recruiting teams recognizing how this should be integrated into what they’re doing at the top of the campus recruiting funnel, to reach more students, to provide more equitable access, to mutually assess fit, and ultimately drive better conversion and retention of those early-career professionals.
Fuller: Well, Jeffrey Moss, Founder and CEO of Parker Dewey, the leader in micro internships in the United States, it’s been a pleasure having you on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.
Moss: Thanks so much, and thanks for all the work you and your colleagues are doing to highlight the importance of this issue.
Fuller: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.