How does a 150-year-old brand stay relevant to the newest generation of talent? They build a long-term talent engine that begins before college and keeps high-potential people engaged well past their first role.
By the end of 2026, Gen Z will account for around 30% of the workforce, overtaking millennials as the largest generation on payroll. In less than three years, Gen Alpha will start to arrive in meaningful numbers. They’re expected to be even more values-driven than their Gen Z predecessors, and the first cohort to grow up with AI in their classrooms from day one.
For talent acquisition (TA) leaders, generational changes show up first in early careers. Internships and graduate programs are where the newest cohort of workers form their first real opinions about employers, and where organizations start to understand what the next generation expects from work. When those experiences land well, you build a bench of people with great habits who choose to stay with the business. When they don’t, you’re back in the market paying full price for experienced talent.
Early careers at The Campbell’s Company sits squarely in that bench‑building space. The program develops candidates so they’re ready for critical roles, and it doubles as a training ground for managers before they own larger teams.
We sat down with JoJo Cosman and Krystal Burgess from Campbell’s to walk through their early careers program. What follows is a masterclass in early careers design that TA leaders can lift into high‑volume and enterprise environments.
Early Careers as Workforce Strategy
Campbell’s runs early careers with a clear goal of developing work‑ready people who can move into real roles and stay long enough to make a difference.
The program is built around a 12‑week summer internship with co‑ops alongside it. Each intake is deliberately kept under 100 people, which protects the quality of projects and makes it easier to track how each person moves from internship into full‑time work.
Interns spend that time working on live business problems in areas such as supply chain, finance, IT, R&D and marketing. Their work feeds into real business decisions, and gives them a clearer sense of how the company runs and whether they can see themselves at Campbell’s after graduation.
Managers opt into the scheme with the same level of intent. They’re given structured training on how to scope work so it’s appropriate for early talent, and how to give feedback that actually helps someone mature in this critical early stage. For many, it’s a first safe place to practice leadership before they take on their own teams.
That mix of meaningful work and prepared managers shows up in the numbers. More than half of the interns who receive offers accept and move into full‑time roles. It’s a standout result when NACE’s 2025 Internship & Co‑op data shows intern‑to‑hire conversion dipping for employers overall.
Pipeline Starts in High School
Campbell’s meets future talent long before they step onto a college campus. The early careers team visits high schools to talk with students and open up their sense of what the company actually does, well beyond the soup aisle! Careers in areas like supply chain or R&D are barely on most students’ radar at this age, so the team uses real examples, such as how Campbell’s navigated Covid‑era disruption, to challenge assumptions and show the scale, complexity, and impact of those roles.
Those early touchpoints open doors for students who might never have pictured themselves in these kinds of careers. They also put Campbell’s in the picture before other employers start competing for attention. By the time campus recruiting season hits, most students already have a shortlist of “dream” companies. That early high‑school outreach nudges Campbell’s onto that list and plants the seed well before the competition shows up.
Campus job fairs still play a big role in the recruitment marketing mix, but they look a little different here. Campbell’s focuses on a smaller set of universities and sends hiring managers alongside recruiters, so students meet the people who actually run the teams they might join. Those managers run interviews on the spot and make same‑day hiring decisions. This asks more of their time, but shrinks time-to-hire and turns what could be dismissed as a low‑ROI branding exercise into a real hiring moment that gives candidates a direct line into the business.
Intern Voices Sell the EVP
Campbell’s could lean on big employer brand campaigns to sell the intern program but doesn’t. The work, and the people doing it, carry most of the weight.
Interns and early career employees talk about what they are working on through their own social channels and the company’s feeds, in short videos and posts that show what their day actually looks like. The team steers away from influencer‑style takeovers and keeps the spotlight on peers talking to peers, unscripted. The internship experience itself becomes the proof point for the early years program, rather than heavy corporate branding.
That kind of authenticity cuts through for Gen Z. Study after study shows they trust user-generated content more than brand ads, and first‑person storytelling, from the interns going through the program, challenges any sense of Campbell’s as a sleepy, old‑line food brand. Through that intern advocacy, Campbell’s starts looking like a place where young talent has real projects, real impact, real say; exactly what Gen Z and Gen Alpha say they’re looking for in their first jobs.
Compliance in the Age of AI
Like any hiring organization, Campbell’s now has to think just as hard about the data and tools it uses as it does about the early careers experience. The same program that sends managers to job fairs and encourages candid, intern‑led content also sits in a landscape where AI products and third‑party data are everywhere in recruiting.
Once outside information or AI‑generated scores start to influence which candidates move forward, you’re into Fair Credit Reporting territory. Anything that functions like a background report or score from a third party needs clear disclosure, consent, and a way for candidates to see and challenge it before a decision is made. Employers and vendors that pull together third‑party data and rank candidates on that basis are treated much more like consumer reporting agencies, with the same duties on transparency, accuracy and correction.
That raises the bar on how AI and data can be used in practice. Scraped or inferred signals that are hard to verify increase the risk of bias, and using them quietly in the background can put organizations on the wrong side of long‑standing law. The expectation is that companies know when third‑party data sits behind a hiring decision, can explain it to candidates and can fix it when it is wrong.
One live example sits in a very specific corner of the funnel: bot detection.
Many high‑volume employers now use tools that look for signs an application has been generated or submitted by software; the copy-paste phrasing, over-engineered skills and other red flags that suggest an AI-written response. When a tool flags an application and that flag affects who is still considered a candidate, the same duties on notice and the chance to correct mistakes apply.
Campbell’s pushes for a candidate‑first stance in those conversations. In practice, that means telling candidates when an application has been flagged and giving them a simple way to confirm they are genuine and interested in the role, and keeping a human in the loop for the final call. Detection still runs in the background, but candidates can see what is happening and how to respond, which keeps the use of AI in line with both legal expectations and the wider philosophy that runs through Campbell’s early careers work.
Identity Verification in Hiring
The same questions come up around identity checks and sensitive data. Tools that verify identity for travel or events are now being offered inside hiring flows, including for early careers, and some rely on credit‑linked products that only certain candidates can access. Used at the application stage, they risk favoring people who hold specific cards or IDs and shutting out qualified candidates who do not. This bakes new bias into who even makes it to the interview.
The panel’s steer was to keep early checks light and as broadly accessible as possible, then move heavier verification to the offer and onboarding stage when the purpose of the check is easier to explain and defend. Asking for Social Security numbers on an initial application creates security and fairness concerns, so those fields are better held until there is a clear path to hire and a clear explanation of how the data will be used and protected.
Internships as a Continuous Feedback Loop
Campbell’s runs early careers as a live learning system built around what managers and interns see on the ground. Managers are trained to evaluate interns in a consistent way and feed that back into the early careers team after each cycle, so the bar for a full‑time offer is applied the same way across the cohort. Interns give structured feedback on the work and on how clearly that bar was explained, which the team uses to adjust project scope and manager participation ahead of the next round.
On the measurement side, the team watches intern‑to‑hire outcomes the same way they would any other critical pipeline. They track offer‑acceptance rates in September for roles that start the following May and look at how those former interns show up in first‑year reviews with hiring managers.
That mix of conversion and performance data acts as the working ROI for the program and gives senior leaders enough evidence to keep backing headcount and manager time in early careers. The result is not a once‑a‑year intern class, but a living system that keeps tuning itself around what actually drives performance and retention.
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