Welcoming Back Parents

The nonprofit group Path Forward announced last summer that six San Francisco-based tech companies — GoDaddy, Zendesk and Instacart among them — were offering 18-week internships for approximately 20 midcareer professionals. The program is open to those who have spent at least two years out of the workplace as caregivers. The idea is to confront the stigma faced by time away from the workplace.

The Path Forward group is calling them nontraditional interns — and yes, they’re paid. It hopes to bring this idea to other cities early next year. This organization was spun from a New York-based email software firm, Return Path, that started a midcareer internship program in 2015 aimed at tech companies. The program includes training and networking opportunities.

Another recent effort by seven technology and engineering companies — including IBM, Intel and General Motors — runs internships designed for women who’ve taken time away. Begun this year and part of an effort launched by the Society of Women Engineers and iRelaunch, a career reentry firm that runs a conference on returning to work, it is sponsored by finance companies with similar programs — Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. Goldman kicked off the trend in 2008 and trademarked the phrase “returnship.”

The iRelaunch conference acts as something of a recruiting hub for existing programs, and its chief executive says she realized the concept should be brought to other sectors. Carol Fishman Cohen approached the Society of Women Engineers to establish a task force last year that would try to “replicate what we saw in financial services.”

Midcareer internships offer certain advantages, according to the Center for Talent Innovation, a think tank, because they:

  • Expose employers to outside talent.
  • Accelerate the rate of change in industries like tech, where the hiring of an intern for 12 or 18 weeks can help erase the bias many managers have about people whose resumes have glaring holes.
  • Help companies that have a bias when they see a little bit of gray hair — even among skilled candidates —to view them more favorably.
  • Let employers try an employee to determine whether he or she fits in with the firm.
  • Help a working parent rejoining the workforce to come in and get experience, which can be very helpful.

Running internships for returning parents can help send a message to younger workers — that the firm understands that employees may take a career break, but that they would be welcomed back.

If hiring rates are any measure, returnships appear to be successful. At Goldman Sachs, almost half of the 150 people who’ve gone through the program since 2008 have been hired for full-time jobs. Hire rates are 50 to 90 percent in established programs, and the higher end of that scale is for tech firms. PayPal ran a program for nine interns in the United States, calling it Recharge, with the help of Path Forward earlier in 2016, and says that seven of the nine were offered jobs.

All six of the tech reentry interns working in analytics at IBM this spring were recommended for full-time employment after being out of the workforce for two to 10 years. Five have accepted jobs and the sixth is in final interviews.

You might want to look at your own company and consider the advantages of hiring “returnees” for open positions.