The Home Office has clearly come down with World Cup fever, after managing to score a perfect own goal. This week, it emailed the hundreds of students who had applied for its one year internship to tell them that the department would now not be running the scheme after all.
The internship was advertised back in April of this year and over 600 students applied. It would have involved a year working for the Home Office on a very nice salary of £24,000. Graduates would have moved between departments and could have used it as a springboard into the civil service. However, in May the government announced a recruitment freeze and this affected the internship programme as well. Gallingly for the students who had spent hours filling in the 30 page application form, their hard work was thrown in the bin and an email was sent out informing them that the scheme would no longer be happening. When asked why nobody had considered waiting until after the election before launching this year's application process, a spokesman for the Home Office could only mutter that they'd always run it at that time.
And just to truly cover themselves in glory, the Home Office then made the sort of error for which no intern would be forgiven. They sent the "sorry we've closed the scheme" email to everyone who had applied, and copied all their email addresses in. Needless to say, the students were less than impressed. The Home Office located its BCC button in time to send yet another email, apologising for the "administrative error" but by then they'd made an already bad situation, worse.
The cancellation of the scheme is yet another blow to the graduate recruitment market. Tanya de Grunwald, editor of graduatefog.co.uk, told us: "The cancellation of this scheme is more than disappointing for graduates - it's a wake-up call. Until now, this sort of programme has been viewed as a solid, steady option for high-achieving graduates. Now they're thinking, 'If this scheme has been cut, what else will be cut?'".
The Home Office issued the following statement: "The Home Office is committed to providing opportunities to talented graduates within the possibilities of government rules and financial realities. This is reflected in the continuation of the cross civil service fast stream programme in 2011. We respect people's privacy, and apologise for an administration error which resulted in applicant's emails being disclosed".
