Internship season is underway! For employers, this is a great way to connect with potential future hires. Yet, to ensure interns have a positive experience, you can’t expect filling coffee orders and doing data entry to suffice. This article examines steps you can take to appeal to top intern talent.
For interns, landing the right opportunity is important and competitive. Yet that doesn’t mean that employers can sit back and simply expect gratitude for the opportunity. Internships can help you identify top talent and funnel them into a full-time role in the future.
Why appealing to interns matters
Hiring someone as an intern has many advantages on its own. Your business could benefit from a fresh perspective on familiar problems or long-term processes. The generation entering the workforce now is also highly tech savvy. They adapt easily to software, social media, artificial intelligence, and other aspects of digital transformation. Perhaps more rapidly than your current employees.
Internships can also serve as a trial period for future hires. This hiring path offers many benefits with stiff competition for talent in the wake of the “Great Resignation.” As “Quiet Quitting” and “Act Your Wage” labor trends negatively impact productivity and employee turnover, your business gains from avoiding the time and cost of recruiting new people.
You know your interns already, and they know your business and how it works. This makes future onboarding more efficient. Plus, you’re bringing on staff that can make a positive contribution much sooner than a hire with no previous exposure to your business.
Even if you’re not looking to hire from your intern pool, providing a top-notch experience to the students who work with you can help your word of mouth with future intern talent. Having interns finish with you enthusiastic about what they learned can also enhance your overall business reputation.
This all leads to the important question: How can employers ensure that their internships appeal to top talent? The following strategies can help.
#1 Make the work meaningful
Provide interns with real opportunities to make a difference. Including them on projects that require critical thinking and problem-solving skills helps interns prepare for future roles and responsibilities. Plus, having a hand in real solutions to actual problems is more likely to motivate them to work hard for your business.
#2 Emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
Bringing on a wide range of people lets your business enjoy the benefits of varied perspectives and different experiences. Being intentional about DEI in an internship program can also help indicate the importance your business places on supporting disadvantaged populations. Plus, you’ll broaden the talent pool available to you.
Embracing DEI has also proven to enhance collaboration, drive innovation, and increase revenue. Being a part of this kind of workplace culture can appeal particularly to the younger workforce who view DEI not as a preference, but as a requirement.
#3 Communicate culture
DEI may be part of this, but it’s not the only aspect of your company culture you’ll want to convey to interns. By ensuring you communicate your business brand in onboarding and throughout the internship, you give potential future employees a full view of what you stand for and why it matters.
With company culture a key deciding factor among potential employees, taking this opportunity to convey mission and vision to the next generation of workers can reap rewards for your business.
Discover what your employees think with our Company Culture Survey Template!
#4 Leverage technology
Savvy interns seek to expand their marketable skills and experiences during their time with you. With a technological component to many of the most in-demand skills for new hires, interns want to learn what they can about your use of software, cloud-based platforms, and other tech.
Leveraging technology also helps you increase accessibility for inclusion of all interns. Plus, you can enable flexible scheduling and remote or hybrid work environments, which now appeal to workers of all generations.
#5 Establish goals
Meeting early in the internship to learn about the individual’s aspirations and working together to develop aligned goals can offer several advantages. You learn about the intern while demonstrating that you care about their future. With their goals in mind, you can suggest different learning opportunities at your organization. This may help cultivate the individual’s excitement about your company.
Goal setting also helps you customize the internship so that it best benefits both the intern and your company. Knowing what they hope to achieve while working there, you can put them on relevant projects and expose them to necessary skills. You may also identify people you can connect with the intern within your business or from your external network to act as coach or mentor.
#6 Compensate interns
Some employers view participating in their internship program as payment enough. After all, the interns are learning, gaining networking opportunities, and exposure to the people making future hiring decisions. However, paying your interns is considered the “single-best strategy” for recruiting interns into full-time roles, according to the National Association for Colleges and Employers (NACE).
When you pay your interns, you an get them to do real work that lets you gauge how well they might fit in with your team in the future. You also broaden your applicant pool because you can now appeal to the individuals who might not have been able to afford to intern if it meant not getting paid all summer.
You might also consider covering intern relocation or housing expenses. This depends on your budget, of course. But even having someone on staff who can help interns locate affordable housing options can positively impact their goodwill towards your business.
#7 Conduct exit interviews
Ideally this is done in person, with the person that the intern originally discussed their goals. This can be a chance to look back at the season’s accomplishments.
Otherwise, you might invite each intern to have a discussion with your company’s intern manager. Even having a phone or Zoom call, or sending out a post-internship survey, can help you gather useful feedback. Their input could help you shape your program to be more successful in the future.
Meanwhile, you’re also showing student interns that you value their opinions. Asking for their insights demonstrates the kind of respect for individual interns that adds up to greater engagement and higher opinions of their experience with your business.
Work with Sogolytics experts to set up a survey that can make the most of your internship program’s success.
