Here’s What You Need to Know Before Hiring Interns For Your Business
As a thriving entrepreneur with a steadily growing business of your own, you may have heard stories about interns and what they can do for your company. For the most part, interns often perform assisting duties in a typical office environment and are also given tasks that full-time employees would do. The only difference here is that interns are only temporary staff members of a business operation considering that these people are mostly high school or college students looking to get serious work experience under their belts.
The role of interns is sometimes fraught with scandal since there are plenty of cautionary tales out there where companies have treated intern staff in very unprofessional ways. And such unpleasant stories could end up damaging the image and reputation of any business, especially if interns are brave enough to go public with how they were negatively treated by their employers. Naturally, you don’t want any bad publicity to happen in your case, so it’s important for you to understand that taking on interns is not something to be taken lightly.
The key thing that you need to remember is that you want interns to hopefully return and work for you again once they complete their studies. And if this happens to be one of your business goals, then you have to be conscious about how you should treat them once they are confirmed to be working for your company. If you’re in the market for hiring a few interns to help out in your business, then you need to take a few important notes. Look to the information featured below for more details on this subject matter.
Eliminate boredom at work
Although interns already expect their job assignments to be menial tasks, it’s still your responsibility to ensure that they don’t get bored as a typical work day passes by. If there’s one thing that both interns and employees have in common, it’s that they don’t like to be bored when they’re working. As such, it’s in your hands to create a working environment that fosters fun and camaraderie without losing sight of your bottom line, which is producing quality results in a timely and efficient manner.
One of the best ways to eliminate the presence of boredom is to give challenging yet realistically doable tasks to your interns. Instead of having them file paperwork all day, you can give them special assignments from time to time that will stimulate their interest and encourage them to be more proactive with their work. For example, you could have one intern assist you during a client meeting outside of the office, or have another intern manage your email correspondence while you’re away on an important conference.
Be a positive guiding influence
Interns are young and eager to learn and know what it’s like to dip their toes into the world of adult working professionals. They know that they need to earn their keep while they’re still young, so it’s your duty to guide them in the right direction when they join your staff for an internship. Business owners should be aware that students who sign up for internship programs want to apply whatever it is they have learned at work into their prospective careers, so paying it forward is something that could benefit them immensely.
Entering a professional office space can be a very exciting yet scary prospect for many interns because they have to adjust to so many things in such a short span of time. But if you are there to be a constant and patient presence, theyll feel much more comfortable interacting with you and the rest of your full-time staff. You should present yourself as an approachable and knowledgable figure whom they can turn to if they need advice on what they need to do to improve their skills so that they can succeed in their career goals.
Transparency is important
If there’s one thing that you must take into serious consideration, it’s that you have to be honest with your interns at all times. From the get-go, interns should realize that they should treat their internship as if it were hired for a real job, and as such, you owe it to them to be truthful about how your company works and what they need to do to stay out of trouble. Moreover, it’s a bad idea to sugarcoat your words when interacting with interns because it might create miscommunication and produce tension in the workplace.
But just because you need to be transparent with your interns, this doesn’t give you the authority to be brutally frank with them, especially if they made honest mistakes in the line of work. There are countless ways for you to break the news to interns without resorting to using a disparaging tone or abusive language. Try to keep a calm and professional demeanor when talking with your interns because you don’t want them to leave the internship feeling like they were told all the wrong things.
Make them feel valued
The point of an internship is to make young individuals learn the tricks of the trade and taking note of all the necessary skills they would need once they’re ready to graduate and apply to their dream jobs. If you’re under the impression that interns are only there to run errands such as getting coffee and taking lunch orders, then that really goes against what internships are really all about. Plus, the latter makes interns feel that they aren’t valued, and are simply there because someone’s got to do the less important tasks.
When your company has an internship program, you must always make them feel like they’re an essential part of the team. And if you’re only going to waste their talents by letting them do jobs that don’t showcase their skills, then you only have yourself to blame if your business suffers as a result of such a decision. You should also remember that interns are obligated to report to their school administration on what goes on at their internships, so you don’t want their educators to think that you don’t care about their presence at all.
They must be compensated
Don’t be like other companies where they take on interns but don’t pay them at all for their services, even if the internship program only lasts for a few months. Not only are unpaid internships uncool and unacceptable, it also gives your business or brand a really bad name if interns would go public about how they are not being compensated by a company. That being said, you must always pay your interns since many governments and fair labor watchdog groups are keeping tabs on any business that doesn’t pay their interns.
Furthermore, you can’t hope to attract more interns to work for you if word gets out that your internship program is unpaid. You have to know that it’s in poor taste for a business owner to ask for free labor when interns are supposed to experience what it’s like to be a working professional, and part of that experience is getting to earn money for their hard work. Any entrepreneur worth their salt knows that when they pay interns for their services and they treat them with respect, then those interns are likely to return to apply as full-time employees.
