What is a good conversion rate for an internship program?

Before we talk about something like the “internship conversion rate”, we should be careful to define what we’re actually measuring.

One internship conversion rate measures what percent of an internship class received an offer for continued employment after the completion of the internship. This is typically so-called “permanent” employment, meaning an entry-level job upon graduation. It should be noted, however, that a growing minority of interns are rising juniors and even rising sophomores.

A second conversion rate would measure what percentage of those receiving offers for continuing employment accepted those offers. This seems straightforward but is subject to gaming of the numbers by employers more interested in looking good than doing good. What do I mean by that? Some employers will essentially make a soft offer to the intern by asking if they would accept an offer if made and then only extending offers to those who enthusiastically respond in the affirmative. Students who might extend an offer but want to be sure that it is their best path forward by shopping around are then not offered entry-level jobs, which hurts both the employer and intern in favor of boosting the conversion rate.

A third conversion rate that one of our Fortune 1,000 employer customers uses is to measure the number of students who accept the offer to intern against the number who work at least one day after graduation. This is extremely conservative as some of those who accept internships or entry-level jobs don’t actually start. They chose to go this route because they found they were spending a lot of staff time and other resources extending offers etc. to candidates who did not actually start their internship or entry-level roles.

Quite frankly, I don’t think that any of these or other measures are “better” than another. What is meaningful to one employer might be meaningless to another. I’m just advocating that when we talk about metrics like conversion rates that we’re clear about what we’re calculating and how.

Recently, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) stated in one of its listservs that a 50 percent conversion rate is a rough rule of thumb as below that you tend to see the costs of the internship program outweigh the costs. I believe that it was referring to the percentage of interns who are rising seniors who accept an offer for entry-level employment upon graduation. Note that would be different from the percentage who both receive and accept such offers.