SAN FRANCISCO — As soon as the credits rolled on “The Internship,” Rachel Kang, a 20-year-old University of California-Berkeley sophomore, headed straight back to her apartment to Google jobs at Google Inc.

“I have always loved Google. I think everyone does. The movie just cemented my appreciation even more,” Kang said after seeing a sneak preview of the film last month. “I do think a lot of people will be even more drawn to the company than they are now.”

That’s just what Google wants to hear.

For years, summer internships at Google have been some of the technology industry’s most coveted. Now a 20th Century Fox film is selling a new generation on working at Google.

In “The Internship,” Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play middle-aged watch salesmen who, finding themselves suddenly obsolete in the digital age, crash Google and with a bit of old-school charm and hustle, triumph over a group of 20-year-old summer interns to land full-time jobs there.

Chief marketing officer Lorraine Twohill said Google lent its brand and its campus to the feel-good buddy comedy to get more people to feel good about Google. The movie hits theaters June 7.

“We are a company that is very serious when it needs to be, but we have always had a great sense of humor,” Twohill said. “We wanted to show that side of us to a very large mainstream audience.”

Google isn’t just selling the world on its products, which are prominently featured in the movie. It’s pitching its corporate culture. Google’s perks such as free gourmet food, nap pods and beach volleyball courts get plenty of screen time too.

Observers say being cast as the young, hip place to work could help Google battle other technology giants such as Facebook Inc. and startups such as Dropbox Inc. for top talent.

“Google has an incredible hunger for talent. It needs to continuously consume talent,” said marketing expert Andy Smith, co-author of “The Dragonfly Effect.” “This movie will build awareness with a mainstream audience.”

This year, Google will hire 1,500 summer interns in North America from a pool of 40,000-plus candidates. The summer internship program is the No. 1 source of new hires for Google, which has nearly 54,000 employees.

Google executives say they are not sure whether the company will get a flood of resumes after the film opens this week. But Google is taking full advantage of its role in “The Internship” to promote itself to college students.

The company has posted on its job website a scene from the movie in which Vaughn and Wilson are asked to answer a brain teaser that Google used to ask prospective hires: “You’re shrunken down to the size of nickels and dropped to the bottom of a blender. What do you do?” (The answer comes later in the movie: “If you shrink your strength to weight ratio, it allows you to jump way higher.”) Accompanying the movie clip are interviews with real-life Google interns.

With its high salaries, perks and college-like campus, Google has long been a top destination for summer interns, who recently rated Google the nation’s best place to work, according to career website Glassdoor. The highlights: A software engineering intern can expect an average monthly pay of $6,463, plenty of face time with managers and autonomy on projects, the Glassdoor survey found.

With three new wellness centers and a seven-acre sports complex with a roller hockey rink, basketball courts, bocce and shuffle ball and horseshoe pits, Google for the fourth time was named by Fortune magazine this year as the best company to work for.

“Everyone wants to work there,” said Jeff Ma, chief executive of San Francisco startup TenXer Inc., which competes for job candidates with Google and tries to recruit Google employees. “This is probably just an additional factor to help it seem cool to work at Google.”

Ma knows all about the attention a Hollywood film can bring. The 40-year-old former MIT student was the inspiration for “21,” the film about a reluctant whiz kid recruited by his MIT math professor, played by Kevin Spacey, to join a team of card counters.

“It won’t necessarily increase the overall volume of people or the quality of the people applying, but it will help Google remain very relevant as a young person’s elite place to work,” Ma said.