Firms Assess Young Interns' Potential

A
quarter of the nearly 480 respondents to The Wall Street Journal's
survey of college recruiters said more than 50% of their new-graduate
hires had been interns at their companies; 14% said more than 75% were.
Similarly, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported
in its 2010 Internship & Co-op Survey that nearly 57% of students
from the class of 2009 were converted from interns to full-time hires,
up from 50% the previous year.

The trend toward intern-pool hiring
has come on very strong in the past three to five years, according to
Monica Wilson, acting co-director of career services at Dartmouth
College. "Internship recruiting will largely replace entry-level
recruiting in the next few years," she says.

Firms
are targeting and tracking students as early as freshman year, and
undergraduates are exposed to corporate presentations and
meet-and-greets within weeks of arriving on campus. Accounting firm
PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example, holds information sessions almost
as soon as classes start and makes internship offers to rising juniors
and seniors as early as the last week of September.

Carlos Moore, a graphic-design student, was commissioned by the
University of Arizona to film and photograph Macy's Inc. Chief Executive
Terry J. Lundgren during campus visits in 2009. Mr. Lundgren's
assistant, at his chief's urging, later asked Mr. Moore to create a
highlight DVD of the visits. That work led to a marketing internship
with Macy's in New York last summer and a job offer after graduation in
May. Mr. Moore now works as a Macy's art director, creating layouts for
Macy's publications.

"He gave me a lot of opportunities," says
Mr. Moore, adding that he felt a bit star-struck when Mr. Lundgren
introduced himself and knew his name.

"Early identification is key
toour strategy of …developing relationships and assessing candidates,"
said Holly Paul, a U.S. recruiting leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers. The
firm hired 1,454 rising juniors and seniors for summer 2010 internships
and offered 90% of eligible interns a full-time position before they
returned to campus.

Sometimes a CEO even has a
direct hand in making new hires. Information sessions and
company-sponsored events are no longer meant for students to merely get
to know a career path. Instead, they are a key way companies assess
students. Recruiters from South Carolina-based textile and chemical
manufacturing conglomerate Milliken & Co. say they use the sessions
to interview potential interns for specific intern roles.

Data
management firm Net App Inc. looks if
students in the sessions ask questions or suggest new ideas—both a big
part of the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company's culture, says university
relations manager Joy Osborne.

Mary Remondini, the manager of work-force diversity and
employment at Milwaukee-based We Energies Corp., says she tracks
interested students from every class—including freshmen—and regularly
looks for ways to incorporate them into the 4,700-person company as
interns and, eventually, full-timers.

Some employers make an extra
effort to sway top candidates. Both Portland, Ore.-based Walsh
Construction Co., which has 355 full-time employees, and General Electric Co. help
interns pay for housing and transportation—in addition to their salary.
Data-management firm Net App Inc. sends interns
to whom it has offered full-time jobs monthly care packages during their
senior year packed with items ranging from company swag to cookiesand
gourmet jam.

Once on the job, companies look to see whether an
intern can make it the cut as a full-time worker. At Chicago-based Boeing Co., Katrina Krebs, a
rising junior at University of Washington, helped solve a
noise-complaint problem with partitions on 777 planes. For two weeks,
Ms. Krebs pulled aircraft plans and met with senior design engineers and
mechanics to disassemble the partition before she and a manager
brainstormed possible design solutions.

"We do
everything we can to facilitate meaningful work assignments for
interns," said Bud Fishback, who manages college intern programs for
Boeing. The company offered 250 of the 909 interns from summer 2009
full-time jobs. Some 80% accepted, said Mr. Fishback.

The
shift to intern-to-hire recruiting hasn't been lost on would-be college
students, particularly as the recession has lingered. Career center
administrators at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Texas
A&M University and Duke University, among others, say they have seen
a recent rise in prospective students and their parents inquiring about
which firms recruit—and hire—interns. Katie Kennealy, associate
director of the career center at Illinois, says she has seen a 15%
increase in such inquiries in the past year.

"Most freshman don't
know where anything is on campus, says David McMahon, associate director
of experiential education at Texas A&M, "but they've figured out
they need a good résumé, and they need to get to a career fair" early
on.

—Gregory Beyer
contributed to
this story.

Write to
Alexandra Cheney at alexandra.cheney@dowjones.com