Do you know where your leaders are?
No, not the current ones. We know where they are: at home, third cup of coffee, pacing around their kitchen trying to find cell service in the middle of a crucial work call. We’re asking about your leaders of tomorrow – the ones who will become your front-line in 3-5 years, advance to become your mid-level managers in 7-10 and step into your executive positions shortly thereafter.
Do you know where those leaders are?
The reality is that the reservoir of untapped talent you’ll be looking to draw from in the very near future is drying up, and corporate America needs to realize how we might be contributing to this scarcity…and what we can do to solve it.
Your Leaders Are Dropping Out
It’s important to understand that this drying of the talent well isn’t because the talent doesn’t exist, because it does. They do. They’re out there – in abundance. They’re just not making it to your organization.
Many young adults in our schools and universities are facing the same situation. For many high school and college students, the choice between paying for another semester of school or helping their parents make ends meet has become a very real decision that has become exacerbated during the pandemic. The number of students enrolling in colleges and universities has dropped significantly over the past year. At one Los Angeles high school, approximately 40% of students who applied to college in the fall of 2019 didn’t end up enrolling, nearly double the rate from previous years. While students taking on jobs helps put food on the table in the short-term, it’s not hard to see how this will play out in the months and years to come: even taking a year off from college dramatically reduces the chances that a student will return to complete their degree.
They could have been your leaders: the ones with the innovative ideas you’ve been looking for, the ones who will take that next industry-changing product or service past the finish line – the ones who could have brought exponential value and worth to your organization. Instead, they were forced to drop out.
Your Leaders Are Being Shut Out
So let’s say our potential leader hasn’t dropped out. She has found a way to pay for her education and is now looking to build a resume with relevant work experience. Where does she go, and how does she get that experience?
Internship experiences have been shown to have significant short and long term effects on career success. With over 90% of employers preferring candidates with at least two internships, these experiences are no longer just nice-to-haves. So what is preventing our future leaders from accessing internships? Just that: lack of access. Despite our best intentions to have an inclusive recruitment and selection process, the process itself inadvertently sifts out some of the best talent before it even has a chance to prove itself.
Even during “normal” years, internships are not conducive to including a majority of students. Applications to these programs, if and when they exist, often require superior academic standing, potential travel to a different city, relevant work experience, and a bevy of other requirements such as participation in extra-curricular activities and interests. And for those students who are fortunate enough to have their education, housing and lifestyle funded - at least to the extent that they can work a job relevant to the career they want to pursue or spend extra time in extracurricular pursuits – this isn’t a problem. But for the vast majority of students, it is. We must to ask ourselves: is our current eligibility criteria reasonable? Does it take into account the second-year student whose “extra-curricular activities” consists of working in a fulfillment warehouse until 2AM just so he can make that next tuition payment? Does it keep in mind the student who would love to participate in her college’s leadership society, but has to instead spend that extra time watching siblings while her parents work an evening or night-time job? How can our organizations hope to benefit from their grit, determination and resilience when we’ve vetted them out at the eligibility stage? How can they hope to succeed – and how can we hope to benefit from their success – if we continue shutting these future leaders out?
Your Leaders Are Going Without
Now let’s say our future leader has persevered. She has found a way to stay in school and, against all odds, manages to find her way into your internship candidate pile. You see her stellar potential and offer her the internship. She responds with enthusiasm, but admits that, reluctantly, she has to turn it down. Why?
Internship opportunities are rarely paid. An estimated 500,000 to 1 million Americans work as unpaid interns every year. And the reality is that many of the best students – including those who have earned scholarships to attend college – cannot afford to accept unpaid internship offers. Some may argue that unpaid internships are the industry norm. If this is true, then why are BIPOC students severely underrepresented in paid internships and significantly overrepresented in unpaid work? If this is the norm…is it one we want to continue actively propping up?
Compared to unpaid programs, paid internships are 34% more likely to lead to at least one job offer after graduation. Paid internship programs not only allow students to participate, but also correlate with better post-graduation outcomes and higher starting salaries. Among 2019 graduates, the majority of students who participated in an paid internship received a job offer from their employer. This was not the case with their unpaid counterparts.
The bottom line is: firms that invest time and money in internships are rewarded for doing so. If we continue to support a system that forces our future leaders to go without, in the very near future we may find ourselves having to do the same.
Turn the Reservoir of Untapped Talent into a Leadership Pipeline
Rather than looking for that needle-in-the haystack of dozens of qualified applicants from our usual channels, it’s time we take an honest look and reconsider our entire approach to recruitment:
1. It is crucial that we place the experiences of low income and BIPOC individuals at the center of our efforts by considering the unique ways in which this talent pool is affected.
While extra-curricular involvement may sound like a simple ‘side factor’ for us, it could be an insurmountable requirement for a student who would otherwise make a stellar internship candidate…and potential new hire. Keep this in mind when creating the language for requirements of your program applications.
2. Reach out to local 2-year and 4-year colleges, not based on prestige, but on the diversity of the student population.
You may be used to being in a position where potential talent just comes to you, but remember: the system we have created prevents the talent we want from showing up at our doors. We are going to have to go out to find talent, not wait for it to find us. A good place to start is connecting with minority student groups to advertise that your firm is hiring.
3. Pay your interns (go here if you don’t know where to start).
Paid internships are one of the simplest and most effective ways to protect your talent pipeline and ensure that the future of your company has the best and brightest leading it, no matter the crisis.
In our work with organizations, we keep hearing that we need diverse talent pools. The irony is that the systems we have created and continue to perpetuate prevent those pools from inviting and sustaining the diversity in talent we claim to seek. Stephen Jay Gould summed it up rather honestly when he wrote,
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
The sort of thinking that will solve the problems we are currently faced with will not come from the same sort of thinking that created them. We need a diversity of thought and representation if we have any hope of stepping into the future with fearless authenticity. We must remove the roadblocks, provide the necessary resources and open our doors to the massive reservoir of talent that is seeking to make its mark on the world.
Internships matter. Access matters. Let’s stop leaving our future leaders behind.
