Last Updated on February 4, 2025 by Dave Schoenbeck
Financially, hiring an intern makes sense. Since college interns are relatively inexperienced and generally only stay with you for three months at most, you can pay them less than your full-time employees. Still, interns shouldn’t be relegated to “glorified errand runner” status. If you hire the right talent and treat them well, interns can save you much more than salary expenses. They can lend an extra hand, inject fresh new ideas into your organization, and even become star employees in the future — provided you do the following first.
5 Tips for Hiring an Intern
Scout for interns in places other than LinkedIn.
Granted, LinkedIn is a great place to look before hiring an intern. However, it would be best to look at other platforms like LookSharp and YouTube, specially designed to bring interns and employers together.
Alternatively, you can contact local universities that offer business internship programs. I highly recommend that you develop a relationship with their placement office. Since students enrolled in these programs receive college credit, they’re more likely to take their internship seriously. Also, seeing what a college or university is like firsthand can give you insight into the quality of the school’s graduates.
Could you organize the internship program beforehand?
The last thing you want is a starry-eyed undergrad fumbling around your office, not knowing what to do. Before hiring an intern, please make sure you’re both clear on what you’d like to gain from the internship.
You can find out as much as you can about the intern.
In addition to interviewing them about their skills and experience, ask specific questions to learn how they’ll fit into your company’s culture and work personality. Determine which workplace tasks can be offloaded to interns and match them to your candidate. Make a rubric thoroughly detailing what’s expected upon hiring the intern from day one to their last day.
Treat your intern like an employee (to a point).
For your interns to be productive, they need to feel like an integral part of your workplace (rather than just being “extra baggage”). So treat them like you would a new hire.
Schedule a “get to know you” session with other employees, including your in-house mentor. Give the intern a quick tour of your facility so they’ll know where to have lunch, where to go for bathroom breaks, and the like. Create tasks that make use of their existing skill sets while challenging them at the same time.
However, be careful not to challenge them too much. If you have a strategically critical task (like customer service relations with a major client), it’s better to let the more experienced employees handle it. Otherwise, you’ll risk traumatizing your intern and losing important business simultaneously.
You can give your intern something other than experience.
Whether you believe in paying interns or not, the fact is that financial rewards are a powerful motivator. Studies have shown that paid interns are likelier to become full-time, long-term employees. So, if you want to make it easier to recruit talent in the future, you’d do well to offer perks that attract the best interns.
Internship programs shouldn’t be taken lightly. When you hire an intern the way you’d hire a promising new employee, you can add value to your organization for the short term (during the intern’s stay) and the long term (if you decide to bring them on board for the future).
Need more business tips? Schedule a free consultation with me.
Coach Dave
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