As schools wind up classes and commencement celebrations, students and new graduates face a daunting season of job hunting and a nationwide unemployment rate that just ticked up to 8.2%. Fortunately, there are still plenty of openings at some big companies that offer seasonal jobs, and at firms that have paid internship programs for students and new graduates. Many of those jobs can turn into full time positions.
We asked job aggregation website SimplyHired.com to put together a list of the companies that have the most summer, seasonal and entry-level jobs open right now. The list is a rough gauge of where the jobs are, since an opening can be listed in more than one place and thus appear as a duplicate listing on SimplyHired. Also, job postings often remain online even after they have been filled. To make sure that the companies on SimplyHired’s list are in fact hiring, we did some spot checking and found that there are indeed openings still waiting to be filled.
The companies with the most postings span quite a range, from big box retailers like Walmart and Lowe’s, which do seasonal hiring every summer and tend to pay low wages, to rental car companies Enterprise and Hertz, to the entertainment giant Walt Disney and national security lab Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.
In Pictures: Companies With The Most Summer Jobs Still Open
At Walmart, most of the jobs are not exactly career starters. They are in retail outlets and pay between $12 and $13 an hour. The company does have a corporate summer internship program as well, with positions in eight different areas, from human resources to product development, but those posts have already been filled. At AT&T, the company has also filled most of its roughly 600 summer internship posts for college students and recent grads, but there are still some summer internships open. A few pluses to AT&T’s internships: The firm pairs most interns with mentors, and lets them shadow company executives to get a taste of what those jobs are like. AT&T is hiring a total of 1,200 students and recent grads this year, including interns.
At Sandia National Laboratories, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin that develops and tests the non-nuclear parts of nuclear weapons and conducts other scientific research, the company also has summer internships that remain open. About 30 intern jobs are unfilled, of the 300-400 interns Sandia is hiring this year to work in its Albuquerque , N.M. and Livermore, Calif. offices. Sandia’s internships often lead to full-time positions at the company.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car is hiring 1,800 management trainee summer interns this year. The interns work in the rental branches and handle day-to-day administrative work. About half of those interns go on to become full-time Enterprise employees.
If you use SimplyHired as a job search tool, keep this caveat in mind: Online postings tend to be inflated and out of date. For instance, SimplyHired told us that there were 240 job openings at Sandia. Margaret Quinn, who works in human resources at Sandia, says there are only about 30 intern jobs and fewer than 100 entry level jobs for graduates still open. While a site like SimplyHired can give you a rough sense of the number of openings available, do check directly on a company’s website, to verify that listings are still live.
It’s worth running a quick search on SimplyHired to get a quick sense of which companies are hiring, and to use its built-in LinkedIn function. If you have a LinkedIn profile—and you absolutely must—you can search for jobs on SimplyHired and instantly see which of your LinkedIn connections is connected to someone inside the firm. For instance, when I searched for Sandia, I found that I am connected to two people who know employees there. Living in New York City and spending my entire career in media, I never would have dreamed I had a connection to a national security and science research lab in Albuquerque. But those two connections could be invaluable to me if I decided to pursue work there. I could reach out to them and ask for an introduction to someone on the inside, which would immediately give me a leg up on my competition.
