Get excited: For the first time in over two years, the summer interns will be back! They’re coming to breathe new life and fresh ideas into American offices—at least, they told us that they were coming. We really hope they’re coming.

This season, it isn’t another wave of Covid-19 threatening internship attendance in some industries, but a highly competitive intern-recruiting market.

In years past, internships were a coveted prize—so much so that some students even worked for free. This summer, amid an ongoing labor shortage, the internship landscape looks different. On Wall Street, intern salaries are up ~37% YOY. Roblox is dishing out nearly $10,000 for a summer’s worth of work, with other tech companies not too far behind.

But even after accepting an already sweet offer, college students continue to shop around for a better deal. According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, interns are jumping ship so frequently that companies like General Mills have begun to overhire in anticipation that dropouts will reduce class sizes to target.

To attract top talent and keep the early-career pipeline running smoothly, some organizations are fine-tuning their programs to interweave work and play in hopes they can offer an experience that’s a step above the competition.

Keep reading to learn how some internship programs are competing for top talent.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.

We’re only a few weeks removed from former Google executive Laszlo Bock suggesting that many executives view a full-time return to the workplace as an eventuality as inevitable as death, taxes, and never having enough cutlery in the office kitchen.

Bock claimed a fellow executive told him, “We’ll get everyone back into the office eventually. I just don’t want to pick that fight now.”

Now a new survey from the research consortium Future Forum may offer insight into why some executives might want to put the kibosh on the hybrid-work experiment: For them, returning to the office hasn’t been all that bad.

Since 2020, the Future Forum has surveyed thousands of workers and managers quarterly about where they’re working, how it’s going, and, generally, how they feel at work:

• In Q1 2022, researchers sounded the alarm about a “troubling double standard” brewing between global knowledge executives and their subordinates.
• In the winter of 2021, respondents reported their mental health declined. According to the report, work-related stress and anxiety “is skyrocketing,” at nearly 30% since last quarter, hitting the highest levels researchers had recorded since June 2020—and the pain wasn’t distributed evenly around the office.
• Rank-and-file employees reported experiencing more than twice the level of work-related stress and anxiety as executives, and their work-life balance scores disintegrated at five times the clip of executives’ over the past quarter, plummeting to ultimately sit 40% lower than their bosses’ work-life balance scores.

Click here to continue reading how differences in returning to work could fuel the discrepancy.—SV

Meet Shayla Thurlow, the new VP of people and talent acquisition at the Muse—a one-stop shop for job postings, career coaching, and seemingly endless articles offering professional advice.

Our conversation with Thurlow covered how long she takes to hire candidates, what a horrible first day taught her about transparency, and what to call the sensation when you realize your new dream job isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

One of the initial reasons the Muse jumped from being a magazine to a job board seemed to be that readers were really frustrated with the hiring process—in particular, going through multiple rounds of interviews to realize that the company wasn’t a good fit. As the head of HR at the Muse, what’s something that you specifically ask your recruiters to do early in the hiring process to ensure that the potential job will be a match that’s a good fit on both sides?

One of the things that I am very passionate about—and certainly ask recruiters to commit to—is transparency. Oftentimes in the job search process, employers put their absolute best face forward, like, “This is amazing! We don’t have any challenges! Oh my gosh, you’re just gonna spring out of bed and run through the doors every morning!” For me, it’s very important that we’re honest about whatever challenges we have and what things that this person is going to have to navigate…

Another complaint that Daily Muse readers had about the hiring process was that it took forever to hear back about job postings. In your ideal hiring process, what’s the best timeline?

It’s very difficult to put a number of days or weeks on that. But I would say that if it takes six months for someone to decide if you’re a fit, then their process is broken. It shouldn’t take eight interviews for someone to know if this person is the right fit. By the time you get through that many interviews there’s really nothing new for them to tell you. I think employers should have a process that takes long enough for them to ensure that there’s a culture and skill fit. And not a day longer than that.

Keep reading for our full interview, including the best HR advice that Thurlow has read in The Muse.—SV

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: East Asian women in the tech industry are up to 42% more likely to report being “demeaned and disrespected, stereotyped, left out of the loop, and treated like they were invisible” on the job than white women, according to a new report from researchers at the University of California, Hastings College of Law (Fast Company)

Quote: “With inflation going on around the world, they want cash in hand…”—Fran Katsoudas, chief people, policy, and purpose officer at Cisco, on the company’s reallocating bonuses to employee salaries (Bloomberg)

Read: LinkedIn ghostwriters can earn hourly rates on par with some attorneys helping some executives build up their personal brands online. (Business Insider)

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Catch up on the top HR Brew stories from the recent past:

• People with Autism seek allies in the workplace. Advocates say HR can help
• Whether employers keep vaccine mandates or end them, there are no easy answers
• Coworking with Linda Kong