How to develop an everlasting relationship with your interns
About the Author: Sugandha Dhamija works as a content writer at Evercoast Communications, a full-service digital marketing agency. An avid reader by night, she talks about various ways through which they maintain long-lasting relations with their interns.
As an emerging startup, we largely believe that having no experience isn’t a synonym of difficulty. Rather, freshers have a non-judgmental perspective for everything, are fervent and creative, and are eager to adapt to the newest technologies. Hence, when we began working on our own IT solution with our experienced in-house team, we decided to hire an intern for digital marketing. And honestly, when it comes to a youth-oriented solution, you can always rely on a Gen Y tech-savvy intern.
As we had heard a lot about Internshala being a favorite destination for finding and hiring interns, we posted our specific requirements on their portal. We clearly outlined the roles and responsibilities for the position and two interns were shortlisted from a bunch of interesting resumes. Sooner than expected, we got the right candidate and hired our first intern within a week of posting our requirements. The complete intern hiring program with Internshala was a smooth and pleasant experience as the processes were well-defined.
Here’s what we have learned from running a successful internship program:
• Keep a track of potential interns:
If you wish to hire talented interns, it is vital to keep a list of potential applications you can select from. Very likely, you will have to go through each profile, email them the opportunity, and keep plumbing your network regularly. Make sure that your startup’s profile is kept up to date on Internshala.
• Focus on what’s in store for them:
If you are considering to hire an intern for your startup, any candidate would want to know ‘What’s in store for her?’ After all, having done nothing but mindless data entry for a potentially defunct startup will be worthless on a resume a year from now. Your job description needs to make sure that the candidate will be getting some valuable knowledge, in addition to the usual internship work.
• Communicate your expectations very clearly:
While your intern hiring process is on, make sure that you clearly communicate what the intern is going to experience, what are your mid-term and long-term goals, and what can she expect from you. Industry experts keep telling us that failing to do all of this is one of the major bloopers an employer can make. You must be completely upfront with your interns during the interview so that their expectations are set right. Any disconnect between the expectations of an intern and an employer will always end up in a bad internship experience for both.
• Offer them hands-on experience of a project:
If you wouldn’t do it yourself, never ask your interns to do the same. Interns come to us to learn a new skill set and to gain experience of real-time projects. Thus, we must give them real projects, valuable work, and learning opportunities so that they get hands-on knowledge of everything. Also, providing them experience with supervision will also ensure their ability to handle the work.
• Have a formal performance management process:
Every new intern requires a mentor, a guide who gives her the knowledge of everything along with a quick feedback. This strengthens the mentor-intern relationship. Also, this escalates those underlying issues that you don’t know otherwise. This relationship also proves to be useful in defining the journey of an intern from the beginning to the end of the internship period, thereby recording her accomplishments.
Following the above-mentioned tips will enable you to develop an everlasting relationship with your interns and will result in a productive internship program for your organization.
Planning to start an internship program for your organization? Please post your requirements here.
