How to get an off-campus internship in India, according to 20,392 postings

Diti & Rishit · Hopin

Nearly every guide to this is written from memory. Somebody got an internship once, wrote down what they think worked, and it turns into advice for a hundred thousand people. We did that too for a while.

Then we started tracking postings properly, and a few of the things we had been repeating turned out to be wrong. So this guide is built off 20,392 internship postings we collected across India, and where the data says something different from the usual advice, we have gone with the data.

1. Drop the dream-company list

This is the big one and it is the opposite of what most people are told.

14,004 different companies posted an internship in our data. 10,878 of them posted exactly one, then never posted again. Only 64 companies posted ten or more.

Making a list of twenty companies you admire and going after them properly is good advice for full-time roles at large firms. For off-campus internships it quietly removes you from most of the market. The companies that hire the most interns in aggregate are thousands of small ones you will never think of individually.

So the goal is not to pick well. It is to see a lot and respond fast.

2. Check daily, not on Sundays

Follows directly from the first point. A company hiring one intern is not running a two-month process. Somebody needs help, they post, a few people reply, they pick one, the posting comes down.

If you do your job search in a Sunday-evening block, you are seeing a fraction of what went up that week, and the good ones are already gone. We did this for months and could not work out why everything we clicked was closed.

3. Write to a person, not a form

48.4% of the postings we tracked are applied to by messaging someone or commenting on a post. Not through a careers page. And 65.9% of postings had a recruiter's email address attached.

One caveat before you act on that: 98.3% of what we track comes from public LinkedIn posts rather than from careers pages, so our sample naturally contains more "DM me" roles than the whole market does. Take it as a fact about the hidden job market rather than about every internship in India. It is still the part of the market most students never work properly.

This is the single most actionable thing in the data. If you have been sending applications into forms and hearing nothing, a big part of the market was never behind a form to begin with. There was a person, and their email was right there.

A short specific message to that person will beat a perfect application in a queue almost every time, because there is no queue. If you want examples of ones that got replies, we keep a wall of real cold emails that worked.

4. Know what the money actually looks like

3,178 of our postings had a monthly stipend stated by the employer themselves. Here is the shape of it.

The median is ₹12,000 a month. Around 4% of postings pay ₹40,000 or more.

We are including this because stipend anxiety wastes an enormous amount of people's time. If you turn down ₹10,000 waiting for ₹30,000, you are holding out for the top decile of a market you have not entered yet. Take the experience, then have the leverage next time.

One more thing worth knowing: remote does not pay a premium. Median stipend for remote internships in our data is ₹10,000, against ₹18,000 in Bengaluru. Remote saves you rent, not a salary bump.

5. Make each application cheaper

Everything above adds up to one conclusion, which is that this market rewards throughput. Not carelessness, throughput. You need to be able to see a posting the day it appears and respond well without it costing you an hour.

Practically that means having a base resume you can adjust in two minutes rather than rewriting, a short message template you actually personalise the first two lines of, and somewhere that aggregates postings so you are not checking six sites by hand every morning.

We built Hopin to do that last part, so treat that as the biased recommendation it is. The principle holds whether you use us or not: the binding constraint on most students is applications per week, and almost nobody optimises it.

What we would actually do, in order

1. Get a base resume to a decent state once. Stop rewriting it.
2. Set aside 20 minutes each morning rather than three hours on Sunday.
3. For every posting with a recruiter email, write to the person instead of using the form.
4. Apply to things paying ₹8,000 to ₹15,000, because that is where most of the market is.
5. Keep a competition or two running in parallel if you are good at them, since that route can skip the queue entirely.

If you want to start now rather than plan, here are the off-campus internships open today. It rebuilds daily, which after reading all of the above you will understand the reason for.

Cheering you on,
- Diti & Rishit