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If you’re looking for an innovative way to hire talent, you may want to consider creating an internship program at your company. In fact, 70% of employers end up like their interns so much that they hire them for a full-time position.
This can be a great way to bring in some fresh talent and ensure that you train them to be the best full-time employees. However, if you’re going to be hiring a lot of interns, you’ll need an effective internship program.
Keep reading to learn more about creating an intern program that will attract the most qualified candidates.
Benefits of an Internship Program
One of the advantages of offering an internship program is that you can handpick the future talent for your workforce. You’ll be able to evaluate and screen potential employees and see if they would be good candidates that you can hire for a full-time position later on. If you do want to hire them full-time, then you’ll save money on hiring costs.
In addition to that, interns who are hired into full-time roles already know how your company works, and they can train faster and be productive faster than a brand new employee would be. They also have a shortened learning curve and may not need much onboarding either. This makes these programs beneficial for both the intern and the employer.
You’ll also be able to improve your retention rate when you hire full-time employees who already know about the company and the culture. The interns will be able to decide if they want to accept a full-time position based on the company culture. When they can make a decision with more information, they’re more likely to stay at the company.
Having an internship program can also be a great way to source talent. Not only do you have your own hand-picked pool of talent for future positions, but the interns can also recommend your program to other college students who might be interested. This will give you access to hire all kinds of fresh talent.
You’ll also be contributing to your community by investing in local, young talent. This can improve your employer brand, but it will also help with your employee morale when they feel like you’re involved with the community.
Hire an Internship Program Coordinator
If you want to enjoy all of those benefits of having these programs but don’t have an existing internship program, you’ll first want to hire a great internship program coordinator. This person will be in charge of hiring and managing all of the interns. You need this person to build the program and focus on these intern relationships. If someone else had to manage this on top of all of their other responsibilities, then your intern program might not be as successful. If you don’t have the resources to hire someone full-time, then you could have two existing full-time employees act as internship coordinators run this, and dedicate a certain amount of time to the position each week.
Having an intern coordinator ensures that intern development is at the center of the program. They’ll ensure that your interns actually have a good learning experience and that the interns develop over their careers. You want to ensure that they’re prepared for a future career, whether it’s with your company or not.
The internship coordinator may also want to host workshops on different business topics, give career advice, host training, and be available to answer any questions the interns might have. They’ll also be in charge of interviewing potential interns.
They’ll also have to work with a human resources department to determine how to pay interns. They’ll have to determine if they want to pay minimum wage to interns, have unpaid interns, or offer competitive wages to draw in better talent.
Set Realistic Expectations and Goals
When you start an internship program, make sure that you’re realistic with your goals and expectations. Sometimes internship programs are too ambitious, so you’ll want to set up a realistic expectation of how many interns you’re going to hire and how they will work in each department.
Do you want them to work on long-term projects? Or do you want them to offer help to full-time employees on a day-to-day basis? Regardless of which option you choose, make sure that you have a way to track their progress and success. They should have reports that you can track so that you can see if they’re achieving their goals and actually learning something new. You may even want to have required training for them to take and complete to ensure that they’re progressing in their career.
Create an Application and Screening Process
Your intern program coordinator should start thinking about what types of interns they want to hire and attract to the company. Creating an ideal candidate profile can be beneficial to attract the best candidates to a job application.
Once you’ve decided on what qualifications you need from an intern and what types of responsibilities they’ll be managing, you can start advertising the internship job description. You might want to start by advertising it on niche job boards for interns or on college websites or forums. Think outside of the box and figure out where most interns will be looking. You may even want to advertise on social media sites like LinkedIn.
Once you have a few top applicants, you can interview them. However, your interview process should not be as long as a typical interview for a full-time employee. If you have too long of an interview process, the interns may accept another job somewhere else.
Focus on Helping Interns Grow
One of the most important factors of having a successful internship program is making sure that you give your interns the chance to grow. Remember, they’re not full-time employees, and they’re still in college learning how the business world works. This is their time to set themselves up for a great career, but they can’t do that if you don’t help them grow.
Make sure that each intern has a personalized experience and find the right type of work for that intern. If any of the interns have feedback about the type of work they’re doing, listen to them and try to accommodate it.
Managers should be meeting with interns on a weekly basis to touch base and have a chance to make any updates if necessary. This way, you can also ensure that everyone is on the same page and can make any changes to your internship program as needed.
Consider Hiring Internship Candidates Full-Time
If you like any of the interns at the end of the successful programs, you can hire them full-time as well. Not only will this save you on hiring costs, but you’ll know that you’re making good hires who already have experience working at your company.
However, if you don’t have any interns that you want to hire, you may need to fix your formal internship program and hire quality interns. If you need help hiring full-time employees in the meantime, Recruiter.com can help you.
As experts in recruiting, we have all of the resources and tools needed to help you recruit interns, contractors, part-time, or full-time employees. Contact us today to find a recruiting solution that suits your company best!
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