Starting Out Right: How Internships Shape Culture and Careers at Hologic

When we discuss businesses making an impact, we often talk about false choices. Should a business focus on profits or community action? At Hologic, we don’t believe that you must choose. Growing revenues allow us to invest in more global health programs. The two are inextricably linked.

But this isn’t the only example of false choices.

Every summer, we welcome a new group of young seasonal talent, carefully selected for their skills, energy and attitude. Some organizations use intern resources primarily to serve the company, completing thankless tasks or working on tedious administrative projects. Other programs focus specifically on intern development, allowing them to choose interests and project collaboration points. It’s unproductive to consider these elements of internships to be mutually exclusive.

Hologic interns work on a wide breadth of projects that touch every group within the organization. I joke that we could run the company utilizing only their capabilities. We strongly believe that our people drive our business toward sustainable growth through high performance — not systems, not processes, but people given the opportunity to be their best. When we get this formula right, we all win together.

While we certainly gain a lot through the intern’s contributions, this is also an opportunity to set them up for success, wherever their careers take them. Just as our employee onboarding program begins with Strengths Finding, we talk about building strengths-based teams. It’s not a complicated idea, but it is a bedrock concept that effective leaders need to understand. Truly great teams focus on what each team member can contribute at the highest levels. What can they do well? What do they love to do?

We also tie this conversation to team goals. After assembling a team, we must outline progress against defined goals. How do we know what success looks like? We need to be able to measure results to gauge improvement.

A huge success of this program has been the rate at which interns have come aboard as full-time Hologic employees after graduation. While full-time employment offers are selective and vary greatly by the needs of each department, a high percentage of interns accept offers with Hologic. Over a five-year period from 2017 to 2022, we averaged a 95% job acceptance rate in the US. In Costa Rica, we’ve achieved a hiring rate of 89% from 2015 to 2023.

To me, that says that our program isn’t just instilling healthy work ethics and demonstrating how to succeed in the business world but positioning Hologic as a place where young people want to start their careers. I wouldn’t want you to take my word for it. We reached out to full-time employees who have experienced our intern program.

Emma Boushie currently works as Associate Product Manager for Surgical Marketing. She said, “My role at Hologic fuels so many different parts of me. I work cross-functionally with Upstream Marketing, Engineering, Finance, Strategic Contracting and Marketing Communications. I said ‘yes’ to a full-time role at Hologic after two summer internships because I have never been so challenged and encouraged in my life.”

Felipe Gonzalez serves as Project Engineer for Manufacturing Operations in Costa Rica. Felipe said, “What can I say about the internship? It is the best thing that could happen in my life. The time in the internship, the different responsibilities that I had, exposure and support from the management team were amazing. The challenges that we faced helped us to be better engineers/people every day and to gain maturity and knowledge not only in the workplace but also in our personal life.”

These are the types of stories that I love to see. A healthy intern program delivers value in all areas of the business: injecting groups with fresh perspectives, developing talent by challenging and empowering young minds to solve real problems and creating the type of culture that young workers want to share.?