How The New York Times rebranded the internship program to attract more underrepresented students
When I came to The New York Times Company in late 2016 and took over the management and recruitment of the Business Summer Internship Program, I knew that I had to scale our recruitment efforts to ensure we were attracting all students, no matter their background, or major. While The Times has undoubtedly been an influential force of journalism for over 150 years, our mission to help people better understand the world extends its reach far beyond the newsroom. Regardless of whether or not you work in the newsroom or in any of our business functions, one thing is clear: the institution is filled with passionate, driven people from diverse backgrounds and experiences, united with a love for the mission and the brand.
Most students are unaware that The Times has opportunities outside of the Newsroom, even though Business offers more positions. To give some perspective, Business is comprised of roles within Technology, Marketing, Advertising, Product & Design and Data Insights. Throughout our recruitment process, we look beyond majors to find candidates for our roles. We’ve hired students from across the U.S. with backgrounds in computer science, philosophy, economics, marketing and advertising and that’s only scratching the surface! There have been countless times when I’ve met students or employers and when they hear that I work for The Times, they immediately think that I’m a reporter or that I’m recruiting for the Newsroom. Part of my job has been to build a recruitment strategy, increase awareness and to make recommendations of partners that will increase our diversity hiring at the junior level.
With the release of our diversity and inclusion data earlier this year, it’s more important now than ever to hold ourselves accountable for continued progress. When recruiting interns and creating programming for the cohort, it’s important that we are inclusive. By aligning ourselves with partner organizations who share similar goals, we’ve been able to attract and hire talent from across the country, from both diverse and underrepresented backgrounds.
When coming up with ideas for 2018 programming, we took a number of steps to ensure that representation was made between the Newsroom and the Business side. Prior to orientation, we created bios for all 76 interns, all of which highlighted their hometowns, schools and goals that they wanted to achieve over the 10 weeks. On orientation day, we had assigned seating and purposely shuffled the groups so that there would be a balance between gender, team and department. Similarly, our speakers represented both functions, and for the first time, leaned mostly female over male. We mirrored this same approach to all of our intern events, including our Speaker Series, Field Day and our first-ever, Bowling Night Neediest Cases Fundraiser.
We did send an anonymous survey to the intern cohort, encouraging them to tell us how they felt our program was/not inclusive. Some of the feedback we received included the following statements:
“The internship was inclusive in the way they allowed us to meet and get to know one another. During orientation it was nice that people were unable to clique up extremely quickly because there were already planned groups put together. That’s what allowed us to get to know one another.”
“The intern class is pretty diverse, which I think is great. I also really appreciate that there are many talks from people on both the newsroom and the business side from people throughout the organization and that they’re open to all interns.”
“The program brings together a diverse group of people (in regards to age, career trajectory, race, hometown, and more) in a way that promotes discussion across these lines.”
Before partnering with Handshake, The Times attended career fairs all across the country to promote our Business and Newsroom opportunities. Historically, however, it is our brand that has been the driving force as to why thousands of students apply for our internships. With our new partnership, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to engage with students from an even wider net of schools and refine our brand awareness. What attracted us to partnering with Handshake was its reach. The accessibility that students have — an account as soon as they start school with exposure to hundreds of employers and job/internship opportunities at their fingertips — is something that I wish I could have had when I was an undergraduate.
