Internships are a fantastic opportunity for both companies and prospective employees. For businesses, internships are a chance to cultivate talent, evaluate potential hires, and identify future leaders. For interns, it’s a way to gain practical experience, build professional networks, and gain experience in their chosen field.
However, many companies struggle to convert these high-potential interns into full-time employees. A lack of structure, follow-up, and engagement during and after the internship can lead to lost opportunities.
Abode’s features help nurture intern relationships from start to finish. The platform enables companies to convert top talent into dedicated full-time employees. This success is reflected in the stories of businesses that have enhanced their intern-to-full-time conversion process.
The Value of Internships and Conversions
Internships aren’t just short-term projects building a future talent pipeline. Interns who have worked at your company, learned about your culture and contributed to your projects are a natural fit for long-term roles. However, businesses often see interns slip away without a structured system for maintaining relationships and smooth transitions.
However, when structured well, internships can lead to stronger employee retention, reduced hiring costs, and better organizational cultural continuity. So, the big challenge for companies is ensuring their best interns transition into full-time roles.
With Abode, companies have found the perfect solution to this challenge. The platform makes it easy to stay in touch with interns, keep them engaged, and ensure they feel valued, setting the stage for transitioning to a full-time hire.
The Impact of Abode’s Structured Exit Programs
A well-executed exit program goes beyond handing over a certificate of completion by preparing interns for what comes next. It’s a transition, a warm hand-off from intern to employee. With Abode, companies can maintain structured communication, offer mentorship, and provide interns with the resources to feel ready for a full-time role.
For example, UHY, a leading professional services firm, faced a big issue with intern reneges before implementing Abode. While their recruitment program was successful, they struggled to retain interns for full-time positions due to a lack of post-internship engagement. They had a 16% renege rate for interns and a 12.5% rate for full-time hires, which resulted in financial losses exceeding $100,000 annually.
Once UHY adopted Abode, renege dropped by 81%, saving them $82,000. Abode’s tools helped streamline communication, keeping interns engaged and informed through features like automated touchpoints and task management. This allowed UHY to maintain a structured exit program beyond the internship’s last day.
Jacob Breese, Senior Campus Recruiter at UHY, shared: “Abode is the premier candidate engagement platform. They understand how Gen Zers show up in the workforce.”
Mentorship and Community: Promoting a Sense of Belonging
One of the biggest reasons interns choose not to stay with a company is a lack of connection. They’re more likely to look elsewhere if they don’t feel like they’re part of the team or don’t see a clear path to full-time employment. However, mentorship programs can mitigate this.
Forvis Mazars hires around 1,000 interns annually, but they struggled with inconsistent communication across different regions before using Abode. Interns hired in advance were often left without a clear point of contact for months, resulting in disengagement. With Abode’s mentorship and community-building features, Forvis Mazars maintained relationships with interns well beyond the end of their internships.
Abode’s community forums allowed interns to interact with each other and with full-time employees, creating a sense of belonging. These forums, alongside structured mentorship programs, ensured that interns stayed connected and felt valued, even if they were months away from starting full-time.
In their first year using Abode, Forvis Mazars achieved an 88% candidate adoption rate. They sent over 8,500 notifications to keep interns engaged and informed. As their team noted, Abode became the central hub for providing resources, creating engagement, and ensuring the interns felt connected long before their start date.
Long-Term Benefits of Hiring Interns Full-Time
The benefits of converting interns into full-time employees extend far beyond the immediate cost savings of recruitment. Companies that successfully transition interns into full-time roles enjoy long-term advantages, such as:
- Cultural continuity: Interns already know your company’s values and norms. You can maintain and build upon that foundation by converting them into full-time employees, creating a more cohesive workplace environment.
- Lower hiring costs: Recruiting externally for full-time roles can be expensive. But when you’ve already invested in interns, hiring from within saves time, money, and effort. UHY experienced these savings firsthand, noting a significant reduction in recruiting expenses with reduced reneges thanks to Abode.
- Stronger employee loyalty: Interns transitioning into full-time roles tend to have higher levels of commitment to the company. They feel invested in the company’s success because they’ve already contributed to it during their internship. As Forvis Mazars observed, maintaining engagement throughout the internship creates long-lasting connections that translate into better employee retention.
Ready to Turn Interns into Full-Time Employees?
With Abode, companies can finally bridge the gap between internships and full-time employment, ensuring top talent stays engaged and excited about joining the team long-term. Whether it’s through structured exit programs, community-building tools, or personalized communication, Abode provides everything you need to build strong, lasting relationships with your interns.
Curious what your company could achieve by converting more interns into full-time employees? Let us show you how to make it happen.
