Cleveland Film & Photography

I've never met or encountered so much as one employer who seriously, honestly offered a paid position to unpaid interns. There is no incentive whatsoever to hire someone who is willing to work for free. The fact is, people who have no support systems in place—e.g., parents willing and able to provide housing, food, work clothes, and so on—can't afford to work for free. We have bills to pay and roofs to keep over our heads. What experience is gotten from unpaid internships doesn't help when we're facing homelessness because of our unpaid jobs not paying the bills. Too many employers have unrealistic expectations. You can't expect "freshers" to have experience when you won't hire or train them for the job you want filled, nor can you expect people to work for free simply because you dangle a paid position in front of them that you have no intention of delivering. That particular con no longer works, and it didn't work all that well to begin with. If you want experienced employees, you have to provide them that experience by hiring and training them. The perfect employee, the one who has the experience you want, doesn't exist—not in a vacuum. Such employees are made, not grown on trees or trained in classrooms. Yes, schools should be willing and able to provide students with real-world work experience, but that's an investment most corporations aren't willing to make, and governments, having been thoroughly hijacked by anti-public-anything ideologues, won't provide the necessary funding. So that leaves employers to do what they used to do in decades past: hire and train the employees they want, rather than expecting such persons to pop magically into being.

I see many posts for jobs that require X years of experience in order to qualify, but something that stands out to me is a pattern of some employers wanting experienced applicants but unwilling to invest the time, money, and effort to train inexperienced applicants. When I first entered the workforce, the companies for which I worked all trained new hires to get them up to speed. The understanding was that the number of experienced employees is finite and different organizations use different systems, so to reach full potential, new hires must be trained to company standards. For example: Restaurants. Throwing someone onto a grill or prep line who hasn't the training or who was trained differently at another establishment from what the new place expects is, in my observation, asking for high turnover because the company isn't investing the time and energy necessary into shaping new hires into the experienced employees it wants. People need a breaking in period, regardless of what industry in which they work. While experienced personnel are obviously preferable, such individuals are increasingly the proverbial unicorn in the forest: a rare find. You have to be willing to make unicorns. Your employees will appreciate the effort, and they will feel that the company truly cares about them and wants them to grow within the organization. As a result, they're more likely to remain with the company and put in more effort.