Hiring an Intern — Things to keep in mind

The time of the year is here, when we hire fresh minds right out of college and pave a way for them into the real world. Usually interns looks for growth, network, monetary opportunities and real world experience over a personal portfolio that might also act as a credible pointer on their resume.

Interns bring mixed emotions to me personally. While I have mentored quite a few interns/freshers, I have been surprised both positively and negatively by the new hires. While I find it easy to hire for senior positions as you don’t need to dial down the whole process, while maintaining some sort of filtering to ensure you end up with a capable interns.

I am writing this now, as we @Intugine.com are currently hiring for all positions including the intern position where the process previously wasn’t well defined. So I am compiling my thoughts & research into this article. I hope this clears some common misconceptions around in interns and help you maintain a symbiotic and fruitful relationship.

Self-Assessment : Do you really need to hire 3 interns to handle the menial work that keeps on piling up ? Are you planning on hiring interns without sufficient mentorship bandwidth availability ? Are your intern mentor’s really trained to handle the growth of an individual, so that he is ready as a full-time employee at the end of the tenure ?

If your answer to anyone of the above questions is no, you need to seriously assess and prepare you and your team-mates, so that you can really do justice to the future of the intern.

Even if your answers were all no, it should be a standard procedure to evaluate your needs thoroughly and work with each of the intern to help them create better career plans than they have knowledge to. Some of us might want to hold on to that information till the end of the internship, though it is an important contribution that I have seen has helped lot of my junior peers and helped create a personal bond .

Well I have actually seen interns with no work, it feels worse waiting whole day for literally anything. Valued People quite often put in their best efforts in the work. Even grunt work teaches something and quite often the importance of the work is not relayed to the intern and if they the work being put-in solving actual problems or a part of a bigger picture.

Intern Empowerment: Always provide the best resources possible to the intern, not just direction and feedback. The more you will put-in your interns, the more you would sow. Be clear with the expectations, if the expectations are not met, communicate clearly even when expectations are surpassed.

Mentorship: Often neglected, paving the way for the intern and setting them for success is an essential part of internship. Showing the intern best practices of the business, development, debugging and adopting a mandatory review process in the company will surely result in a positive outcome. Also, if you plan to retain the intern as a full-time employee, one must incentivize education/certification/tutorial/books/resources etc., as a smart and correctly educated worker can outrun an uneducated hard worker any day.

Define Intern’s Responsibility: An acting manager should always relay the responsibilities of his reportees very clearly and by doing so, he/she creates the first step for their success. Expecting people to figure out what to do is a really a counter-productive way to run a business.

By clearly defining the responsibility, you will empower, inform and set boundaries and scope of the work. You might also want to inform them about the fun/interesting parts of their work, as it might motivate them to do their work with more zest and passion. Same should be discussed in regular 1-on-1s to help him stay on track.

Rewards/Bonus: Most of the internships offer some sort of financial incentive/bonus based on their performance at the end of the program. I have personally seen people put in extra efforts to secure their bonus so I would recommend this to be an important part of the offering and same should always be communicated at the beginning of the internship. You can also offer non-financial incentives such as part/full time position, a gift certificate, referral etc, as long as it is actually useful to the intern, should serve the purpose.

As an Employer, you should also recognize that hiring interns takes away some of the valuable bandwidth of a full-time employee and would appreciate some recognition for the same.

If you still insists on hiring interns for nothing but cheap, mindless labor, you won’t find them looking for further opportunities in the future(even worse, a bright candidate would usually quit before the mid-term and you won’t get any result of the effort you and your team would have put in hiring ).

Final Words: Always try to be professional and deliberate with your interns/mentor. Aiming at win-win for both parties involve results in the best actually possible outcome, so this should a priority for both the parties.