Getting the most out of your internship program- Employer’s guide

Some of my best work experiences have come from my internships. I was lucky to undertake 2 internships during my college period and 1 immediately after graduating. I learned a lot about my profession, formed great relationships & advanced my career in so many ways. Statistics have also shown how millennials value growth & development more. Sadly, most companies don’t invest enough in their Internship Programs, to their detriment as we will see below, and miss out on many opportunities. The best firms develop long-term talent acquisition strategies for future pipelines including internships & graduate programs. Here are a few tips for employers to get the most out of this opportunity;

Have a vision & mission

What’s the big picture here? Why does any of this matter? Why should you invest in this anyway? What does success look like? Most HR programs die after a few years because of a lack of vision or a bigger mission that drives efforts. What do you as a company wish to achieve with your program? What impact do you think this program can have on the company, interns, staff, and society? This can be anything from providing relevant work training to students to creating an active talent pipeline for future jobs for the company. The key here is to remember the vision has to be something worthwhile that will inspire everyone involved to work on this. It also has to be timeless.

Write down your goals

Next is to work on your SMART goals for the program. For instance, you can describe the number of students/interns per year you wish to target. Out of those, how many do you wish to retain per year to full-time jobs? Feel free to tie these to your core HR KPIs e.g. employer branding, hiring, or diversity. Your internship should also be linked to your Org design ie it should reflect your cultural goals & strategy plans.

Put your money where your mouth is

We’re all used to companies saying they value people most yet very few rarely follow up on those claims with real actions. Invest in your internship program by allocating resources to it. This includes everything from space(yes not just having your intern roam the office without a proper desk allocation), gadgets & tools(hardware & software), financial allocations in the HR budget for salary and benefits, and most importantly time & attention that you would accord any of the other full-time staff.

Check current Labour Laws & create a policy

HR is a process guided by International Labour Laws through ILO & country or federal laws. Before you start working on your Internship policy, check with your legal team or publicly available legal documents & resources to find out any employment regulations you should be adhering to. Most of the regulations mentioned in the Employment Act apply to interns and employers. Such include laws against discrimination of any kind or employment of underage persons. Apart from these, find out if there are specific laws addressing internships or any legal publications or notices such as this that will guide you and prevent legal liability or risk. Policies provide more structural guidelines about how the program should be run and make it formal & binding. While most companies admit to having internship policies, few have followed through with what they say versus what they do. Also important is to continuously update & review your policies to keep them up to date with company changes, laws & industry trends. Regular training also reinforces the key elements of the policy you want to be followed. Schedule sessions every year with all the departments to get facts straight and answer any questions & get feedback. Apart from a policy, you could write down an SLA instead that would highlight the best minimum experience your interns should expect with your company. More on that here.

Creating Ownership and Accountability

To avoid being one of those companies, create a sense of ownership with the policy & program. Who will the overall ambassador & overseer of the implementation of the program be? Who will they report to? Who will they need to work with to ensure the success of the program?

Apart from being an ambassador of the program, how else can we work to drive key results in the company? First, write down your objectives and targets or key results based on the goals you described above. Accountability counts when there are measurable behaviors and metrics we are monitoring. Here, we can measure things like how are we sourcing these interns. How many schools & institutions are we working with to get what number of applications? Which are our most performing sources? How many interns are we getting per department or function? What’s our brand equity among the student or graduate population? How can we improve this?

Also, work towards getting as many people as possible involved in the success of the program. This includes the HR teams, Hiring Managers, All staff & supervisors. Remember, every touchpoint works to your advantage or disadvantage.

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

The internship itself

Treat an internship with the same respect & attention you accord full-time positions. We’ve talked before about the job market being candidate-driven, with many employers being forced to work harder to improve their employer brand & hiring conversion rates. The internship is a great start for several reasons;

• Branding- Your student interns will share their experience with others on the campuses who will then spread that message online & offline. You can read more about social proof here and how this can greatly impact your brand. This article also delves deeper into how your employees can help you reach your branding goals. With interns & fresh graduates, most companies have also found that the best ways to fill the internship pipeline are by working with student communities & long-term strategies like the ones we highlight here.
• Onboarding- This is sometimes the weakest link during hiring. If you’ve done a great job branding yourself as an employer of choice, and conducted interviews properly but let the ball drop once the intern is in, you’re undoing all that great work. 60% of new hires decide to stay or leave within 6 months. Have a full onboarding schedule & development plan for interns just as you would anyone else. From team introductions to facilities layout, let the interns know you’re excited to have them onboard plus their go-to people for various things inside the organization. LinkedIn Learning has several awesome courses on how to succeed with your onboarding that you can start with and our blog on the same offers more details.
• Work experience- Many are the horror stories told by people about their internship experiences. From being an assistant who just gets coffee and calls for the boss all day to working without a proper job description, there’s much that employers can improve for the intern. Have a clear job advert for your internship positions, highlighting what makes you a great employer, what should the intern expect in terms of daily deliverables, overall objective, key results to be measured, who will they be reporting to, compensation & benefits if any, etc. Last year also raised the global question of internship pay. Most companies take advantage of the high number of graduates looking for jobs per year to have free workmanship. This reflects poorly on your brand & will directly affect how many candidates would be willing to apply for full-time jobs in your company later on. The internship is a chance for your young professionals to acquire real professional experience in certain fields & general skills. Design every internship differently according to the department to help both you & the intern achieve your goals. Part of this includes learning how to manage personal finances. So please pay up.
• Training & Devt- Just like your other hires, interns are interested in advancing themselves through career & personal development. One of the best benefits I received from my 2nd internship was getting unlimited access to the company’s digital learning platform. The site had thousands of resources that covered everything from HR to career development. I still have some of those files to date. I was also included in almost all meetings and staff training. This not only helped me get HR skills but I felt appreciated and seen. At the end of the internship, I was able to suggest career training just for interns during our last week. The company received about 70 interns per quarter. I received a lot of support from the Group Heads who volunteered to share their experiences about their careers & ended the event with a CV and interview training by the Talent Manager. The feedback I received from the interns during their last day was incredible. Another great way to help your interns feel involved and growing is through mentorship programs. You can also employ other techniques like job shadowing, buddy programs & job rotations. Let interns also know of open job opportunities within the company during & after their tenure. All in all, work with the interns, teams, and leaders to identify all the possible ways you can help your staff learn & grow & feel engaged while with you. This could include working with fresh young minds to retrain your older employees on emerging skills through a reverse mentorship program.

71% of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs.

• Feedback & evaluation- Just like with your normal staff, schedule time off in your calendars for continuous performance review of the intern as well as to just get a feel of how the program is going for them. This can be done formally or even over a friendly lunch as well as through online surveys & forms. Remember to also get information about their challenges, highlights & lows & what could help them perform better at their job. You can set these up during onboarding to make it hard not to miss.

Use Design principles to create a meaningful experience

Apply design thinking principles to continuously iterate and improve on the experiences of your interns. Design pushes certain principles that are focused on creating meaningful human experiences through our products or brands. Some of those principles include;

• Human-centered- Your users are human beings who should be treated with the utmost dignity and not as a means to an end. If you treat your staff as humans, it would be easier to provide benefits like food & pay because you understand their key concerns & worries as well as aspirations as humans. Work through career Maslow's hierarchy of needs here.
• Prototyping- If you have an idea, there are several techniques you can use to roll them out or test them without spending too much money. Including the Lean Startup Methodology which follows the Build-Measure-Learn loop. Be an innovative HR team by always testing out new ideas and seeking to learn & improve all your processes.
• Analyse-Whatever is not measured, cannot be improved. Again, break down your big metrics into quarterly, monthly & weekly ones. E.g. how much work was the intern able to do per week, month, or quarter? Move from big data to small data that can only be gotten by interacting with your interns on the ground. This is usually the most actionable & real data. So next time you’re in the lunch line, engage your interns on how the program is going for them. Our earlier piece talks about this & the power of getting out of the building to see the behavior behind the data as well. Trade big data for small data to be able to get much more valuable insights.
• Map out the journey- Draw out all the touchpoints an intern is likely to have with your brand & company & teams using a journey map. This is one of the most used UX tools by big companies such as Chevrolet or Google. Recognize the most important ones that matter to you and the intern. Research how you can improve them for the future & plan small sprints to test out & implement new ideas. Journey mapping will help you not miss out on anything such as the exit process that most companies ignore.

Reverse Mentorship

Take advantage of the generational differences & diversity in your staff database. As we’ve described here, younger staff bring in an abundance of fresh attitudes, skills, knowledge & networks that can prove helpful to you. It's about the ear of the networked alliance as Reid Hoffman puts it. Reverse mentorship can help match your older staff to what’s new & fresh in the world and keep you up-to-date & relevant in your department, business & future of work.

Reward & Recognise

Reward your high-performing interns & graduates. Monetary & non-financial rewards can both work. This keeps them motivated and aware that the company is recognizing their efforts. Create a talent pool for future hiring needs and put up timelines & tools you can use to track these candidates. Doing this manually can be very difficult & ineffective, so apply technology tools like Jobonics or those that use Artificial Intelligence to automatically match new jobs with your interns' lists. Or utilize enterprise alumni tools to keep them engaged & active even after the contract has ended as we describe here. The best companies like Google use different techniques & sources to fill their jobs with quality talent. And who better than boomerangs & referrals? And while at it, don’t forget to reward the best-performing managers & supervisors who are upholding the values you want to expound with your internship program.

“The behaviour that gets rewarded is the behaviour that gets repeated.”- The Pain Writer

Exit & Review

Use feedback forms & exit interviews to get valuable insights into your program and how it can be improved. There are several risks associated with not following proper exit procedures for the company too. For instance, a few years ago I was interning for a Kenyan company. I went back several days after and I still had security access to the building through my badge which hadn’t been deactivated. I also ended up assisting with some recruiting work that day and got to use my old machine & email which were still active. That’s a huge security risk! If possible use tech tools that are built to automate the exit process. For more on how to get the most out of former employees and exit interviews, check out our latest article. Don’t forget to encourage your interns to leave reviews online as well.

There you go. Investing in your staff programs including internships can never go wrong for you. It’s what the best companies are doing to attract great talent early on & fill jobs faster.

What did we miss out? Share your memorable internships in the comments below.

Interns could also provide a fresh set of eyes into your processes and culture by giving unbiased & authentic feedback to you. Check out our latest article for more on this https://medium.com/jobonics/hr-meets-marketing-part-6-the-case-for-the-mystery-shopper-902b812a37ac