How to Get an Internship With No Experience (From Someone Who Hires)

Why this matters more than any job hunt after it

Your internship, LI, industrial attachment or co-op, whatever your university calls it, is the one time in your life a company will take you on with zero experience. Almost every entry-level job now asks for experience. If you miss this window and graduate with a degree and an empty CV, you compete against people who have both, and you lose.

So this is not small. It is the door to your first real job, and a lot of students are standing at the wrong door.

What actually happens after you click Apply

Picture the person who posted the internship. Not a hiring team: one HR executive doing her normal job, with hiring on the side. She posts the role on Monday. By Friday her inbox is full.

How full? Take the biggest example on Earth: Goldman Sachs received over 360,000 applications for roughly 2,600 internship places last year, about 138 applicants per seat. Your local company is not Goldman Sachs, but the shape is the same: one chair and a queue around the block.

Our HR executive has maybe two hours a week for hiring and hundreds of CVs. Do the maths: less than a minute each, and some get zero seconds. She does not read, she scans. And many companies put software in front of her that scans first. Think of a Touch 'n Go toll gate. It does not know you or care that you are nice. It checks for one thing, and if it is not there, the bar stays down, with no explanation.

Why no reply at all? Because replying to hundreds of people takes longer than hiring one. Silence costs her nothing. (At my company we always send a rejection, mostly automated, and personalised feedback for people who reached later stages. But we are unusual.) It is getting worse: one 2025 survey found 48% of job seekers were ghosted by an employer in the past year, up from 38% the year before. The silence has nothing to do with you. You were in a pile that never got opened.

Way out 1: Stop treating Apply as the only door

The Apply button is a crowded door that every applicant uses. Every company has a second door almost nobody uses: a person. Find the actual human through LinkedIn, email or the company website. Not HR, but the team lead or department manager, the person who would sit next to you as an intern. Their inbox is usually quiet. You are competing with five people instead of 500.

What do you send? Three sentences: who you are, one thing you have built or done, and one specific question about their team. Not "I would like to express my interest in exploring a three-month internship opportunity." Nobody talks like that.

When a student messages me or my team directly, showing they know something about us and giving a real reason to remember them, it stands out. A PDF in a job portal does not. I get hundreds. I do not remember PDFs.

Way out 2: Show work, not grades

Everyone has grades: 3.8, 3.9, 4.0. Put your degree, CGPA, club position and hackathons on your CV, that is fine, but understand that nearly everyone else does too. Grades tell me you pass exams. They do not tell me you can do the job, and the job is what I am paying for. Give me proof. It does not have to be big.

Way out 3: Five aimed beats thirty sprayed

Here is the trap. You get ghosted by ten, so you raise the volume: twenty more, thirty more, fifty more. It feels like effort, and technically more applications means slightly more chances, but it is the same mistake repeated. One study found 38% of job seekers are now mass-applying, because AI made it easy. When we post roles on LinkedIn we see the same names apply again and again. If any of them had reached out, got to know us, and shown us proof they could do the job, they would have stood out.

The pile keeps growing; recruiter workload reportedly jumped 26% in a single quarter. You will not out-spray a spray gun. Do the opposite. Pick five companies. Find one real person at each. Build the proof. Write a message that only makes sense for that company, which means doing research.

Then do the part everyone skips: follow up three to five days later with one line. "Hi [name], just checking you saw this. I am really keen to join your team." Half of the replies I have ever sent were to someone following up. Fifty name cards in a fishbowl at a random event will always lose to walking up to one person, shaking their hand and saying hello.

Why internships feel harder than the job after them

Ask yourself how companies fill full-time roles. Here is how I do it: first I look at ex-interns. Then I ask my team who they know. Only then do I post publicly. Most seats are gone before the public ever sees them.

The internship is different. It is the one role companies genuinely open to complete strangers, which is exactly why it is jammed: it is open to everyone, so everyone shows up.

So the whole game is this: stop being a stranger before you apply. The student who messaged the team lead is not a stranger. The student who sent a link to something they built is not a stranger, because I remember them. The student who followed up is not a stranger. By the time their name reaches the pile, someone inside already knows it, so they skip the gate. Everyone else is at the crowded door, refreshing their inbox. For the full-time version of this playbook, read how to get a tech job without experience.

Your homework this week

Pick five companies. Find one real human at each. Send them one thing you have built and one honest sentence about it. Then check back in a month and see what happened.

If you are aiming at tech internships and do not yet have anything to show, that is the real blocker, and it is fixable. A small deployed project you can explain is worth more than another twenty applications. Our free trial lets you start building with AI straight away, and our guide to software engineering internships in Malaysia covers what employers look for. If you want a structured path from zero to a portfolio of real projects, see the AI-Native Software Development Programme.