How GM and Ford fight Silicon Valley for intern talent
University of California, Berkeley student Ryan Cosner could be earning a hefty paycheck working at a trendy California technology company this summer, but he chose to come to Dearborn, Mich., for an internship at Ford Motor Co. instead.
Cosner, 21, is not interested in Silicon Valley despite his emphasis in studying mechanical engineering and technology. He, and many college students like him, prefer to take a spin with a car company.
“One of my good friends, he’s an electrical engineer, he’s never turned a wrench in his life, but he loves the idea of autonomous vehicles,” Cosner said. “I grew up working on cars, I am interested in AVs too. I am kind of a gearhead and he’s a tech whiz, but we’re both landing in the same spot on AV.”
Cosner’s pal, a fellow Berkeley student, interned at General Motors last summer. GM and Ford are increasingly recruiting student interns from top schools with the hope of hiring many of them when they graduate. Both companies are attracting interns from distinguished universities more than they used to, in part because of their push into technology with electric vehicles and AVs, areas Fiat Chrysler has not pursued.
Both companies have sharpened their skills in courting college students, in what’s become an acute competition against each other and Silicon Valley firms for top talent.
“It used to be, we’d do everything just to fill in those slots,” said Michael Arena, GM’s chief talent officer. “But our reputation has changed and our relationships on campus have improved. We know we’re getting the top of the top at every university now.”
Here’s a look at how Ford and GM use internships to give students work that tests their mettle with the ultimate goal of hiring the best.
GM’s repositioning
Five years ago, GM struggled to scrap together 400 interns and co-op students each summer. Many of those it did attract hailed from unrenowned schools.
Fast forward to last fall. Nearly 11,000 students applied to GM from universities all over the country, including Ivy League schools, for a chance to intern in Detroit for the summer. They endured a grueling interview process to win one of only 620 openings.
Take Caroline Wade, 21, a senior at Duke University interning in finance at GM’s Technology Center in Warren this summer. She submitted her resume to GM last fall. She did several interviews before GM assigned her a hypothetical case study. She had to build a financial model and run analysis on it, then make a recommendation on a solution. If she passed it, she would get an offer to intern at GM, she said.
“I had to wait a week and I sweated it out a little bit,” Wade said.
Then, she got a call from a GM representative. “He said, ‘Carly, I have great news.’ I was in the cafeteria at Duke and I got so excited.”
Most GM interns will get full-time offers for employment at the end of their 10- to 12-week internship, said Arena, who declined to provide exact figures.
Wade is sweating it out again, hoping on her final day in her internship, Aug. 3, she will get a full-time job offer.
“That would be my dream job,” Wade said.
Every 26 minutes
The wages GM pays its interns and co-ops is $20 to $33 an hour, but it’s a far cry from Silicon Valley companies that typically pay $40 to $45 an hour, students say. Ford leaders declined to say what it pays interns, but GM and Ford both pay for out-of-state interns’ housing.
The internship programs are an important feeder for the two companies to fill in permanent, full-time hires. In fact, every 26 minutes GM hires a full-time employee from the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, said GM’s 2017 Sustainability Report.
GM’s hiring success lies in its 2013 decision to reduce the number of “strategic campuses” where it recruited to 18 from 30. Fewer schools allows GM to focus its efforts and build stronger relationships on campus, Arena said.
“Every year there is a team of GM employees assigned to the core schools, led by an executive,” Arena said. “It’s where we form deep relationships with professors and the deans, so we can build a network that continues to produce.”
Arena said GM is competing for talent against Ford, Apple and Google, to name a few. So GM uses its work on EV and AV technology to position itself as a tech company on campuses, he said.
“That means we go away from the Midwest to some extent and towards the coasts,” Arena said. “More than half of our overall employees come from outside Michigan. More and more, that’s coming from the coast. It used to be we hired from Michigan and that’s it.”
Many of GM’s interns now come from such prestigious schools as Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech University, Stanford University, Harvard University, Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Michigan and Michigan State, Arena said.
Ford’s feeder pool
Ford had about 580 interns this summer, most doing a 12-week internship. The number of interns Ford hires has remained stable over the past five years, said Lena Allison, Ford’s manager of U.S. Talent Acquisition.
But, like GM, Ford is more efficient at finding top interns. It’s better at articulating Ford’s mission and it promotes the idea of an internship as a segue to a permanent job, said Allison, who was a Ford intern herself 27 years ago.
“They understand that they’re not here for the short term,” said Allison. “They know we’re very interested in them, we give them meaty assignments. They’re not here to just get coffee, so to speak.”
Allison declined to say how many of Ford’s summer interns it typically hires, but characterized it as “a very high number.” About half of Ford’s interns come from out-of-state universities, and Ford has increasingly looked at such schools as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT and the University of Notre Dame.
Allison said the company studies data to determine the schools from which it has historically best recruited talented people with highlevel skills to match its jobs, she said.