There is little doubt that interns can bring a great deal to tech businesses, playing important roles in smaller companies and doing the tedious but necessary chores in larger organisations. But there is a huge dichotomy in what kind of pay they receive from enterprises and startups.
Google interns can earn $6,000 a month over summer, while entrepreneurs aiming to get their company off the ground find it hard enough to pay themselves, let alone hiring a graduate to work on the product.
Then there’s examples like Sony in September, when a graduate had to threaten the billion-dollar giant with a lawsuit to get paid for the work he did.
So often interns end up finding themselves working at a loss, with not even their travel getting reimbursed. CBR speaks to Nathan Parcells, CMO at InternMatch, about the viability of paying interns, and what benefits they can bring to your firm besides making the tea.
Q: How good or bad are tech firms at paying their interns?
A: There’s clearly more paid positions than other industries like journalism where not being paid is almost considered a rite of passage, but it could be better. There’s enough competition for talented interns that you do get a lot of money from the bigger firms.
But there are also startup companies and small businesses in the tech world which have very low or even no revenue and they’re trying to figure out what’s a legal hire. It’s a major issue – there’s definitely value from having an intern on board but that’s overlooked by a number of companies.
Q: What is a tech company looking to get out of hiring an intern, and is payment that much of an incentive for students and graduates looking to break into the industry?
A: Tech companies need people to do a variety of tasks, even basic things like their Twitter or building SEO landing pages. The core goal for most of the companies we work with is to hire the interns. They’re looking at the students making sure they’re a good culture fit. They will make offers before the end of the internship.
We did a survey of our students and what mattered most to 3,000 interns was access to doing work experience. Being paid was right near the bottom.
But interns are doing real work, they’re supposed to be hired as a regular employee and paid. Unpaid interns actually struggle just as much to find a job as someone with no intern experience at all. Paid internships have people doing a different level of work because the company invests in them.
They want at least minimum wage or having their expenses covered, as long as they’re not working for someone at a loss.
Also by not paying, it excludes people from lower income backgrounds whose family maybe can’t support them while they’re on an internship.
Q: How else do interns lose out by not being paid – does it affect them from a legal point of view?
A: When someone’s not legally employed they’re not protected from discrimination or sexual harassment in the workplace. There’s a much higher proportion of interns not covered by really basic employment rights. That’s one of the biggest issues. They can’t defend themselves; really they’re in a powerless position.
Q: What about startups or smaller businesses with little in the way of spending power? The founders are often going without pay just to help their companies survive in the early stages. They have no spare cash and so if they’re required to pay for an intern, they probably will go without – doesn’t that deny interns great experience at a place they’d be doing valuable work?
A: That’s an argument people are trying to think through and figure out. But in a lot of cases, you have companies with millions of dollars where it’s easy and right to offer paid positions but they are choosing not to more because that’s the traditional path to get into the industry.
Q: How is InternMatch trying to challenge that mindset?
A: We have a voluntary Intern Bill of Rights we are encouraging companies to sign up to. We worked to create this as a list of best practices we see some companies using and we want to educate other companies to use these too.
We will definitely keep promoting it, we have more than 50 companies now and it’s something we want to keep gaining momentum around.
Q: What is the proportion of paid and unpaid internships generally offered by InternMatch?
A: Right now our site has 60% paid roles, which is a decent amount above the national average, which is 50%. We still have unpaid positions which is interesting – our thinking behind this is right now we have seen our aim being to convince people during the posting process that paid positions get two-and-a-half times more applicants, so we make a business case and a legal case for paying in the hope that we can convert more of these companies to it.
