Choosing the Best Intern for Your Business
Interns can be a huge asset to your business – and you’ll want to pick the best, right? But who will be the best? This can be a tough one, and just because it’s a time-limited placement doesn’t make it any easier.
Here’s a key tip: have a good idea of the profile of the intern you’d like to select before you start. What does your business need? What specific tasks will you be assigning to your intern? You could get a lot of applicants, especially if you advertise on the Internet. Make sure you spell out the qualifications of the position so applicants are pre-briefed to tell you about the skills or personal qualities they can bring to the job.
Selecting an intern can be even more difficult than hiring a new employee because you won’t necessarily be able to rely on evaluating their resumes. Internship programs are usually designed to give people the work experience they don’t yet have. That means you’ll have to rely on other criteria to pick the best candidate.
Do you want a self-motivated person who has a good grasp of the working world? Then you might want a person looking to change careers, rather than a student. Do you need someone to interface with clients? An interview will reveal applicants’ interpersonal skills and some aspiring interns may have valuable experience in public-facing work in other sectors.
An interview or online application process will give you opportunities to assess an applicant’s specific practical skills for the job. It helps to make a list prioritizing the skills that are needed. Examples include computer literacy (including specifics such as working with spreadsheets), and language and writing skills.
If the work you are offering is something that any reasonably intelligent, adequately educated person could pick up on the job, you may need to make your ultimate decision on other criteria than existing and transferable skills. Here’s where you draw on your own business acumen and intuition!
A positive attitude, willingness to learn, communication skills and organizational ability are things to look out for. Internships are usually not well remunerated, and some are unpaid, so the very fact that they’re applying may serve as some evidence of applicants’ motivation to learn and grow. Asking for testimonials and character references may also help if you’re in any doubt about who to select.
You’re not looking for a new CEO, so don’t be over-demanding or set your sights too high. In a way, adding an intern to your team makes you a teacher as much as a boss and you need to tune into people’s untapped potential. There are bound to be lots of suitable candidates, and making a call between people with different skill sets can be difficult. If you’d rather not choose between two, you could consider bringing them both on and having them work together on a team. You’ll have less work because they can brainstorm together, answer many of their own questions, and you know what they say, two heads are better than one.
Deanna Maio, the Intern Expert, guides small business owners to find, select, and manage interns successfully to grow their business. Take the first step towards having interns help you get clients, develop new programs, attract prospects, and make more money by downloading Deanna’s absolutely free Internship Discovery Kit at http://www.GetFreeHelpWithInterns.com.
