<</</p> Demand for interns in companies, start-ups surges as slowdown loomsInternships -- once a mandatory part of college curriculum – has become a key HR recruitment strategy. Today, students flock to internships as they more than often not guarantee a job. As the Indian economy’s growth rate slowed down to 5 per cent and more companies looking to fire employees, a job in these troubled times is definitely on the agenda of most students.Internships offered students a chance to check out job conditions in the real world and effectively build on their skills with job experience. It also offered companies a not-so expensive way to tap into talent and hire them young. This way, a company was able to build its bench strength without compromising a lot on the financial front and still manage a talent pipeline. By using your internship program as a talent pipeline, you’re also ensuring you hire field-tested workers. The company does not have to worry if the interns can do the job or will fit into the company culture; they’ve already proven their abilities.The 2012 Internship & Co-op Survey reinforces the fact that internships are a vital component of employers’ college recruiting programmes. Last year, nearly 60 per cent of interns were converted into full-time hires by companies, the survey revealed.In fact, multinationals across the world are now eyeing internships as an avenue to hire workers. Companies like IBM, Adobe, Siemens, Sony, Intel, Deloitte and KPMG even have a webpage dedicated to the intern on their websites.Now, Google, Infosys and Coca Cola are eyeing interns. “It is undisputed that a good internship programme helps attract A-Grade talent, it also helps an employer evaluate how an individual would fare in the actual workplace scenario,” PTI quoted a Google India spokesperson as saying. Google India has BOLD (Building Opportunities for Leadership Development) Engineering Internships for summer 2013.IT major Infosys has a global internship programme -- InStep – where undergraduate, graduate and PhD students work on high impact assignments ranging from live technology projects and cutting-edge research to business solutions from Infosys offices in India. At Coca Cola, internships are designed to position the company as a future employer for the interns.Glassdoor, a jobs and career community, ranked tech giant Google as #1 among interns for the second year in its second annual report of the Top 20 Highest Rated Companies Hiring Interns Right Now. The report was released in February 2013. Glassdoor quoted a Google Platforms Project Manager Intern (Mountain View, CA) as saying, “Google treats interns even better than full time employees. All of the employees all the way up to VP personally spend time with you and take your opinion.”  Procter & Gamble, Qualcomm, Microsoft and Nordstrom are other companies in the top five of the list.Some internships turned out to be really high paying jobs. A Microsoft Research Intern earns the highest average monthly base pay ($7,050 per month). Google Software Engineer Interns bring in the second highest average monthly base pay ($6,462 per month), followed by Microsoft Software Engineer In Test Interns ($5,951 per month).The demand for interns from companies was so huge that some entrepreneurs saw a golden opportunity to tap the market. Many portals were launched -- LetsIntern.com, HelloIntern.com and Internshala. These portals contain database of around 20, 000 firms and educational institutions listing internships both in India and foreign countries, according to a report in SiliconIndia.“Barring the IITs and IIMs, most colleges leave students to fend for themselves when it comes to internships, even though it is an integral part of most academic courses,” says Karthikeyan Vijayakumar, founder of Twenty19.com, a portal which focuses on students especially teenagers or those in twenties looking for an internship, told SiliconIndia.Many foreign students are willing to work for small and mid-sized companies even small ad agencies, NGOs or even online entertainment portals. “India is already the next growth engine and hence, an experience at Indian startups is something which a lot of foreign students are now looking for,” Pranay Gupta, joint CEO, Centre for Innovation, Incubation & Entrepreneurship (CIIE), IIM-Ahmedabad, said in an interview.Hiring interns is almost akin to hiring regular employees. They require varying levels of training, depending on the role they’ve been asked to play. Some interns may be complete greenhorns, but managing and molding them is not an exercise that is exclusive only to interns. Hiring interns is a bad strategy for entrepreneurs as they look at it as a chance of free labour. Blogger Barry Moltz gives some strategies that an HR manager needs to look at for successfully implementing an internship programme:Pay the intern an amount for his time in the company