Join/Renew
Despite all the information on hiring, it can be difficult to determine why some of our students are hired quickly and others are not. Career educators and recruiters can regularly access a great deal of macro-level economic data on hiring outcomes. NACE provides us with a wealth of national first-destination survey data that can be sorted to isolate many different factors, including region, level of degree, type of college, and more. Through this information, we know which degrees typically lead to which jobs, what skills employers say they want most, and which job skills are included more often in position descriptions. We can access “after-the-fact” research on why interviewers say they hired particular candidates.
Yet, the decision to hire one candidate over another is typically not made at the macro-level or based on national data. Hiring decisions are most often made on an individual level: The hiring manager must decide which candidate to offer the position to after interviews. How is that decision made? Other than through the personal experience of making hiring decisions and/or conversations with employer partners, most educators and recruiters don’t have insight into or research about how the hiring decision-making process happens in real time. Hiring is a process that most often happens behind closed doors, one in which we can see and count the results but not explore the interactions that lead to specific outcomes. As career educators and recruiters who want to develop and promote early career talent, we need to talk about what we are missing when we don’t recognize that hiring decisions are based on more than skills, experience, and degrees.
Hiring in Real Time: Affinity Bias and Cultural Capital
Lauren Rivera went behind the scenes in 2012 to watch hiring in real time at elite firms.1 Rivera found that in cases where the applicants had similar qualifications and backgrounds, the candidate who had the most in common with their interviewer was typically the person offered the position. There are likely two different phenomena at play in these scenarios. The first is affinity bias, which is a psychological term used to describe the human desire to prefer people who remind us of ourselves.2 Rivera found that when candidates' qualifications were equal, those who shared an alma mater or similar hobbies with their interviewer were preferred.3
Affinity bias is a particularly difficult problem to solve.
The other phenomenon at play, cultural capital, is not as difficult of a problem to solve.4 Cultural capital was first defined by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in 1986 at the same time as he defined social capital—a term that NACE recently included as a benefit of internships. Cultural capital is the nonfinancial and intangible signifiers of belonging to a group. Cultural capital may include how a person speaks, behaviors that demonstrate group membership, and the individual’s level of education. Even attire can demonstrate cultural capital. Think of cultural capital as walking into the room as though you belong. Yes, there is confidence at play, but with cultural capital, you know how to speak, when to speak, what to wear, and when and how to show up. Cultural capital relates to social capital in that one can create the other and vice versa.
In his 2017 article, Matthew Hora studied the way that skills are discussed by employers who hire new graduates.5 He found that industries function as groups with their own behavioral and cultural expectations. The norms and expectations of one industry may be quite different from those of another. Think about your colleagues who have moved from recruiting to higher education or from higher education to recruiting. Many of them will talk about the differences in expectations, even though both industries will likely say that they need candidates with a strong work ethic and good attitude and who demonstrate “professionalism.”
Professionalism Is an Umbrella Term
When interacting with students across majors and with different industry interests, career educators and recruiters often sum up behaviors expected on the job as professionalism, a tricky umbrella term that ignores the way that behavioral expectations may change from industry to industry—and can impact hiring decisions and new employee retention.
Certainly, each industry has its own sub-language full of acronyms and phrases that have meaning for employees in that profession. Every industry may need critical thinkers, but how to use critical thinking in a lab setting versus a marketing agency may be quite different. Attire expectations vary, and behaviors that may offend professionals in one industry could be expected in another.
New graduates will know the behaviors that have been communicated to them through school and part-time jobs, e.g., be punctual, have a good attitude, but even those professional behaviors have at least minor differences when the student moves into internships and full-time employment. The culture of school is different from the culture of work, even if we might agree that some level of professionalism is expected in both settings. Students, especially those without experience in specific industries, may have the skills and education to succeed, but without the cultural capital, may find it difficult to get started and may experience a large learning curve. For our new graduates navigating the hiring process, gaining cultural capital in their industry of interest is critical to being the chosen hire when qualifications are equal. To quote Hora, “This is why apprenticeships and internships are so valuable—they socialize students into new communities of practice where they learn technique as well as cultural norms and ways of being in specific professional situations.”6
Internships, Social Capital, and Professionalism
Internship programs facilitated by colleges most often focus on learning job skills, not industry norms. Learning outcomes for internships typically focus on aligning classroom learning with on the job-skill building. Cultural and social capital transmission are viewed as by-products of internships, something that just happens by existing in the industry space.
In 2024, we in the career center created an internship program that encourages the transmission of social and cultural capital during an internship, in addition to learning on-the-job skills. The UNC Asheville Internship Program began in summer 2024 and included a dedicated weekly curriculum for internship site supervisors to guide intern supervision on topics that share the nuanced behaviors expected to work in their industry and company.7 Instead of talking about professionalism as an undefined term full of unspoken expectations, supervisors were asked to share the specific behavioral expectations of working in their industry.
Here is an example of the internship supervision topic for the first week:
- What are the best ways for the intern to communicate with you and other members of the organization? This includes both the method—via email, in person, and so forth—and the content, e.g., type of question to ask in person vs. email.
- Is communicating with you as a site supervisor different for the intern than with other members of the organization?
- What expectations do you, as a site supervisor, have around timeliness of the communication?
- What is appropriate attire for work? How do you expect the intern to show up?
After the 10-week internship program ended in the summer of 2024, pre- and post- survey analysis using the Graduate Capital Scale based on Tomlinson’s Graduate Capital Model demonstrated statistically significant increases in social and cultural capital.8 I also conducted focus groups with supervisors and reviewed students’ final reflections to uncover nuance about how social and cultural capital grew during the internship experience. The results point to several ways in which internships grow social and cultural capital, as well as how far we still have to go in defining the specifics of professionalism—not just for students but for career educators, recruiters, and internship supervisors.
The Role of the Internship Site Supervisor
The qualitative data analysis showed that for students, the most critical guide to their industry of choice was their internship site supervisor. The internship site supervisor is the person who teaches an intern how to ”fit,” coaches them on behavior, and helps them build their network through in-organization and out-of-organization introductions.
The internship site supervisor is also typically the person making decisions about which intern to accept into the organization. Through talking with students, the internship site supervisor can make or break their understanding of and desire to enter a particular profession. It is hard to overstate the importance of the work being done by internship site supervisors. They play a critical role in evaluating and bringing in new talent not just into their organization but also into their industry. As one student said, “[My site supervisor] has had a huge impact on my future career. She has helped me to explore my passion for reading and writing by offering me experience in her field. She even took it a step further and helped me brainstorm what possible careers I might like to pursue in the future. She encouraged my potential and has given me great hope for the future of my career.”
Challenges in Communicating Expectations
Career educators and internship supervisors are critical conduits for behavioral expectations during an internship. Still, there is a distinct challenge in sharing the nuanced expectations of professionalism, even for someone who is teaching it as an internship site supervisor.
Several site supervisors talked about the behaviors that students brought with them as assets to the organization, without having to be shared as an expectation of the internship. Examples included interns being “proactive,” “inquisitive,” “punctual,” “intentional,” “an active listener,” “detail-oriented,” “hardworking,” and engaging in “formal communication.” Since these behavioral expectations had not been shared prior to the internship, it can be difficult for career educators to know that they need to share these behaviors explicitly with students as expectations.
Some site supervisors talked about their interns’ behavior in vague language, such as “appropriate” and “professional,” without defining what those words mean in the context of their organizations. Using the terms without defining them implies that everyone understands their meaning, but since “professional” and “appropriate” can change from setting to setting, using the terms without definition can lead to confusion for students.
One example of talking about “cultural fit” without clarifying its meaning came from a site supervisor who discussed their approach to their approach to the interview with the intern: “I was just telling [Student Name] some of the stuff about interviews and expectations. I was like, in all of my experiences, I said, I really think it's like a ‘vibe’ fit. I said, you can have your resume match up, but you interview with the place and you guys aren't the same vibes.”
The example of “vibe fit” illustrates how much cultural capital is often implicit rather than explicit and difficult to communicate: According to Merrian-Webster, “vibe” is defined as “a distinctive feeling or quality capable of being sensed.” The site supervisor here defines hiring decision-making as a “sense” of whether a person will fit in at an organization based on the interview conversation, which makes “fit” difficult to discuss in specifics.
Given that even the supervisors of interns and entry-level employees cannot always explicitly define what it means to be professional in their job—but they know it when they see it—how are career educators supposed to teach it?
Cultural fit, which includes both affinity bias and cultural capital, remains a critical component of hiring and will impact the careers of future graduates for years and likely decades to come. For recruiters and career educators, including specifics in how we discuss professionalism is critical to help our students gain access to their industries of interest. What does it mean? What does it look like? Sharing specific examples and clear expectations will help students who do not yet have the background to walk in the room as though they belong. Internships, apprenticeships, and long-term exposure to career fields can help students learn the behavioral norms expected on the job. By pushing back on undefined “professionalism,” we can help our students “vibe” their way to career success.
Practical Takeaways
Despite the challenges, there are things we can do to help students demonstrate their professionalism and meet expectations:
- Employers can benefit from explicitly defining what they mean by professionalism. When professionalism is undefined, it leaves students behind, especially students without prior access to cultural capital and social norms in their career field of interest. What are the specific behaviors that are needed to fit in an organization? This opens the door to employment for students from all backgrounds, not just those who have had prior exposure to the field.
- Internship site supervisors are the bridge from education to employment. For interns, the internship site supervisor can make or break their experience and even their desire to continue within an industry. Greater investment from both organizations and colleges into the role of internship site supervisor will improve student outcomes and preparation and retention of new hires.
- Walking in the door like you belong is as important as the skills and education that make a person qualified for a position. Internships need to include a clear focus on learning the cultural norms and behaviors needed to succeed in a career in addition to the emphasis on job skills. Educational and skill qualifications must go hand in hand with learning the cultural expectations of an industry for student success.
Endnotes
1 Rivera, L. A. (2012). Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms. American Sociological Review, 77(6), 999–1022.
2 Greenwald, A. G. and Banaji M. R. (1995). Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-esteem, and Stereotypes. Psychological Review, 102(1), 4-27.
3 Rivera.
4 Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. In: Richardson, J., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241-58). Greenwood.
5 Hora, M.T. (2017, February). Beyond the Skills Gap. NACE Journal, 77(3), 23 - 31.
6 Ibid.
7 Mann, L. C. (2025). “Breaking the Cycle of Social reproduction: An Internship Program Designed to Increase College Students' Social and Cultural Capital.” Ed.D. dissertation, Western Carolina University, 2025. Retrieved from https://login.proxy177.nclive.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/breaking-cycle-social-reproduction-internship/docview/3201885700/se-2
8 Tomlinson, M., McCafferty, H., Port, A., Maguire, N., Zabelski, A. E., Butnaru, A., Charles, M., & Kirby, S. (2022). Developing Graduate Employability for a Challenging Labour Market: The Validation of the Graduate Capital Scale. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, 14(3), 1193-1209. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-04-2021-0151.
