Jake Bouvy (l.) and Kelsey Halverson squared off to win a summer job in Emmis Digital's "Intern Games." In the end, both were declared victors. View Full Caption DNAinfo/ Mark Konkol 
 
 RIVER NORTH — Getting a job after college once entailed padding your resume, writing a witty-yet-professional cover letter and nailing the job interview. 
 
 My pal M.L. Elrick once tried to win over a Newsday editor by offering a "free set of steak knives" — a catchy line from a popular infomercial back in the day — in exchange for a job interview.* 
 
 These days, however, young adults vying for a shrinking number of white-collar jobs can't rely on a good resume, the power of a well-crafted letter and a charismatic personality alone. 
 
 In this age of digital commerce, young folks preparing to enter the workforce must display ninja-type skills in producing viral videos, attracting social media scrums and communicating to customers, clients and anyone who will listen on Instagram, among other things. 
 
 There's probably no better example of this than Emmis Digital's recent search for interns that pitted applicants against each other in a "Hunger Games"-themed social media contest for the honor of working for no pay. 
 
 More than 25 college kids applied for the one internship available at the River North office. The top 10 candidates were invited in for interviews, and the field was whittled down to three finalists. 
 
 Emmis Digital's Rory Foster and Katlyn Hayes created a contest, the "Intern Games," to determine the finest free summer laborer in the land. 
 
 "At a digital company, innovation is key. We're looking for candidates with a wide variety of skills, and we wound up with three really qualified people on paper," Foster said. "We thought that it would be fun to pit them against each other, test their mettle and see who was the hungriest." 
 
 Plus, Foster said, the contest turned an otherwise boring intern selection process into an event with potential to at least incrementally increase the social media reach of the company's collection of websites. 
 
 Each of the three "tributes" — potential interns, that is — was assigned to drive social media by pushing their friends, family and fans to follow Emmis Digital pages and create a video explaining why they've proved themselves worthy. 
 
 Every day for two weeks they battled for social media supremacy under the hashtag banners — #TeamJake, #TeamKelsey and #TeamKatie. 
 
 Jake Bouvy, a marketing major at Indiana University, was ready to rumble. 
 
 "Once I knew it was a competition I knew I had to give everything," he said. "I'm a competitive guy. I don't like to lose." 
 
 At first, Kelsey Halverson, a journalism major at Iowa State, wasn't really sure what to make of the Intern Games. 
 
 "I hadn't competed in anything since sports in high school, so it was unexpected," Halverson said. "I've never had to do anything like this before." 
 
 Emmis Digital's "Intern Games" master Katlyn Hayes (r.) declared Kelsey Halverson and Jake Bouvy winners of the social media contest to earn a summer job. View Full Caption DNAinfo/ Mark Konkol 
 
 For two weeks, the three finalists battled by constantly pestering everyone in their social media networks — and sending out quirky posts, photos and short videos aimed at driving traffic to Emmis websites — in hopes of avoiding elimination. 
 
 After a week, #TeamKatie had been felled. 
 
 In the end, Halverson and Bouvy went head to head. 
 
 Bouvy appeared to gain an edge with a slick video to a hip-hop beat that showed off his technical skill and social media success promoting indie music videos online. 
 
 But Halverson's #TeamKelsey still had the edge in driving traffic and attracting Facebook "likes" for Emmis. 
 
 "When I saw that she was beating me, and I had been on Twitter and Facebook begging my friends and family to please like this page, I started to think I was doing too much work to end up losing," Bouvy said. 
 
 All the while, Hayes was back at the office keeping tabs on the successes and setbacks of their potential intern tributes in preparation for a final decision. 
 
 "I think it was definitely more fun for me than it was for them," she said. "I got to watch them battle it out every day." 
 
 When time ran out on the Intern Games, #TeamKelsey was the clear winner. 
 
 "Kelsey was the true winner. She had the higher impact on social media," Foster said. "But in the end we decided, much like the 'Hunger Games,' to keep both finalists." 
 
 Hayes said the decision was easy — and not because having two unpaid interns instead of one cost exactly the same. (The interns receive college credit for their summer labor.) 
 
 "I loved how creative Jake was, and loved how professional Kelsey was," she said. "I knew a mix of them would make a super intern, so I wanted both of them to be here." 
 
 On a recent workday, Bouvy reflected on how fortunate he was to be spared elimination and what he learned during the Intern Games. 
 
 "I was worried, but it all worked out. But it speaks to the state of the job market. You have to stand out in the pack," he said. "It's a message to kids coming out of college that you can't just send out a resume, and hope for the best like your parents did." 
 
 * Elrick didn't get that interview at Newsday, but went on to a stellar investigative reporting career that resulted in a Pulitzer Prize, getting Detroit's corrupt former mayor thrown in jail, among other things. 
 
 For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here: ||||| Katlyn Hayes held no fewer than six internships at various agencies during her college career. Today, the ad ops specialist at Emmis Digital explains her thinking succinctly: “Competition breeds excellence.” Like a growing number of companies these days — especially in the digital space — Emmis recently hired a few new interns using some unorthodox social media-heavy methods. 
 
 The potential interns at Emmis had to compete in a “Hunger Games” social media style competition. In the end, a field of 25 was pared down to 10, then to three. Every day for two weeks, the candidates liberally deployed the hashtags #TeamJake, #TeamKelsey, and #TeamKatie in tweets, videos and Facebook posts in order to impress the folks at Emmis. 
 
 The two finalists, Kelsey Halverson and Jake Bouvy, were eventually both offered unpaid internships due to their creative skills in different areas, combining to create what Hayes called “a super intern.” 
 
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 It was a bit surprising to hear about unpaid, often cutthroat, internships in an exciting and positive light, especially in light of the fact that Condé Nast recently settled a lawsuit brought by underpaid interns and ditched their unpaid internship program. 
 
 “Experience is so important in today’s world. Resumes won’t even get glanced at if students don’t leave school with decent real-world experience,” Hayes lamented. “You learn in a very different way than you would in a classroom. Therefore, unpaid internships are, in fact, very important. Everyone has to start somewhere.” 
 
 Employers are even looking beyond the internship when it comes to filling jobs through social media channels. Increasingly, they will engage with potential employees on various online platforms before they even ask them to fill out an application. The days of filling out a piece of paper while you sweat under your tie are disappearing. 
 
 National Public Radio, for example, has created hiring managers out of all their employees, giving prospective hires a better idea of what they are going into. For instance, having employees use a hashtag to talk openly about their jobs. 
 
 “I came up with the idea of #NPRlife at NPR as a simple hashtag employees could use when tweeting, Instragramming, etc. about work-related things that fans or prospects might be interested,” says Lars Schmidt, the Founder of Amplify Talent. “The intent was to create a platform where employees could share their experience, helping prospects get a sense of the culture and people they’d work with if they joined NPR.” 
 
 What this interaction led to was over 2,500 Instagrams and 10,000 tweets from the current NPR staff, a $100,000 a year savings in job board postings and the Twitter handle @NPRjobs becoming one of their top sources of hiring. Not to mention a dedicated Twitter chat (#NPRTwitterChat) that evolved to assist job seekers with their use of social media. 
 
 Schmidt has recently taken this to SpaceX, a current client. 
 
 “I wanted to find a way to capture the excitement of a rocket launch,” Schmidt tells me. “So we decided to record audio of the launch countdown and employee reaction and load it to SoundCloud. We’ll be embedding this in some of our recruiting materials to help prospects get a sense of the excitement surrounding a launch, and they’ll be a part of that cheer.” 
 
 In the social media age of recruiting, all senses are engaged. The choice between using blue or black ink on an application has been replaced by the picking either six- or 15-second video platforms. Employers, especially in the digital space, know that the best talent isn’t just words on a piece of paper. The best talent is 140 characters or less. ||||| Internships have always been competitive, but at one company, they've gotten downright cutthroat. 
 
 Media company Emmis Digital's Chicago branch decided to do something a little different with its intern recruitment process this year, according to DNAinfo. It received over 25 applications from college students for its one unpaid internship spot. The 10 best applicants were interviewed, and then the final three entered the "Intern Games," a contest to land the internship that would earn them some college credit. 
 
 "We thought that it would be fun to pit them against each other, test their mettle, and see who was the hungriest," Emmis Digital's Rory Foster told DNAinfo. 
 
 Every day for two weeks in late April and early May, #TeamJake, #TeamKelsey, and #TeamKatie took to social media with tweets, videos, and Facebook posts to get the most attention for themselves and Emmis. 
 
 In the end, the Emmis team decided to call it a draw between two of the potential interns and recruited both Jake Bouvy and Kelsey Halverson. 
 
 Internships for college students and recent college graduates have been under more scrutiny in the past couple years, after several interns sued their former employers for back pay. Unpaid internships by law are required to provide education and experience that benefits the interns. (The Emmis interns do receive college credit.) 
 
 The research firm Intern Bridge told the Boston Globe that surveys show about a 20% decrease in the number of unpaid internships across the country since the U.S. Department of Labor defined what constituted an unpaid internship in 2010. 
 
 Unpaid internships may be scarcer in 2014, but if Emmis is any indicator, the market is still tough enough that college students are willing to intensely compete for them.
– In today's world, if you want to work for free, you'd better be ready to do a lot of free work—even before you're hired. Especially if you're looking to intern at Emmis Digital in Chicago, DNAinfo reports. The media company narrowed down its pool of applicants to three college students, then made them compete in a Hunger Games-inspired "Intern Games." OK, they weren't trying to kill each other, but the "tributes" faced off against one another to see who could bring the most traffic to the company's social media. They also had to make videos to prove they deserved the unpaid job. "We thought that it would be fun to pit them against each other, test their mettle, and see who was the hungriest," says one of the employees who came up with the idea. In the process, he notes, Emmis stood to boost its social media following; would-be interns were told to badger their friends, family, and followers to follow the company. Two of the three finalists were ultimately given internships. One of the creators of the Intern Games herself had at least six internships during college, Digiday reports. The kids get college credit for their work; as Business Insider points out, unpaid internships legally must offer beneficial "education and experience." (Even Oprah was once an intern.)