Hiring Summer Interns? How To Create A Successful Internship Program
The article outlines how to create a successful internship program by structuring it with clear educational goals, selecting meaningful projects and supervisors, ensuring interns perform substantive work rather than menial tasks, paying interns to comply with regulations and attract applicants, and collaborating with local colleges to recruit and support students effectively.
An ongoing internship program can be an essential talent acquisition tool. You can meet the brightest potential future employees. Managers can improve training skills as they mentor the interns. Plus, you can be an educational resource for college students in your community.
How Do You Create An Internship Program?
An internship should be structured. A good program identifies specific educational goals. The term of employment usually lasts three months. It may be part-time or full-time. You often hear the term ‘summer intern,’ but don’t limit your program to the summer months. Not all students have a traditional college schedule. It may work best for your company to have a program during the spring or fall.
An intern should be carefully supervised and mentored. An internship should teach practical skills. Plus, it should help the students develop soft skills and a good work ethic.
Determine which departments would benefit the most (for both your organization and the interns). What teams will they join? What is the schedule for their assignments?
Choose current projects. Let them own some of the sub-tasks. Don’t make the interns do menial work. A few minutes doing filing here and there is okay. But make sure that more than 80 percent of the intern’s time is performing the actual job role. An intern isn’t a temp or volunteer.
Choose Intern Supervisors Carefully
Choose a supervisor(s) for the interns. And carefully coordinate with them to design the curriculum and timeline. It’s also a good idea to have additional people judge the interns’ performance.
Unpaid Internships
Unpaid internships have strict compliance stipulations. Pay your interns to be safe. Besides, unpaid internships don’t entice many applicants.
Identify Colleges and Register
Research the colleges and universities in your area. Contact them for the application requirements. They also have beneficial resources to help you devise your program.
Job Descriptions
Just like traditional job advertisements, you need a punchy, yet extensive description. First, list the number of months and weekly schedule. Be specific and thorough.
Advertise Your Intern Positions
The college will have platforms for advertising the position. Use your favorite job boards and careers website too.
Swipeclock Products For Internship Programs
ApplicantStack Recruit and Onboard can help you design and manage a successful internship program.
- 1.Create job descriptions for intern positions
- 2.Automate job applicant scoring for interns
- 3.Let intern applicants self-schedule interviews
- 4.Track intern applicants in a central location
- 5.Share review notes with your intern hiring team
- 6.Post to multiple job boards with a single sign-on
- 7.Create a structured intern onboarding
To compete for promising interns, compose a modern, mobile-friendly intern application process. Manual processes make your organization look like a dinosaur stuck in the past. College students were born in the digital age.
Swipeclock offers WorkforceHub, the unified Human Resources portal that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your managers, employees, and business.
WorkforceHub includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, TimeWorks Mobile, and ApplicantStack. Recruitment, onboarding, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, and employee engagement are included. WorkforceHub is created for busy employers who need to reduce cost-per-hire, streamline scheduling, automate time tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and decrease labor costs.
We can get you up and running with WorkforceHub immediately. Contact us today to request a demo.
Or are you interested in becoming a reseller? Check out the Swipeclock partner advantage now.
Related
Making the Most of Job Posting Sites for Recruiting
The article explains how businesses can effectively use job posting sites—online platforms that share job openings and application details, ranging from broad to niche industries and sometimes integrating with applicant tracking systems—to attract top talent, highlighting popular free options like LinkedIn and Indeed for wide reach and niche sites for specialized roles.
Hiring Processes Glossary
The Hiring Processes Glossary defines talent acquisition as the comprehensive HR activities involved in sourcing, attracting, screening, and hiring candidates—including job analysis, creating job descriptions, posting jobs, conducting interviews, and negotiating offers—while explaining that the management of these tasks varies by company size, from owners in small businesses to HR departments or outsourced recruiters in larger enterprises.
Talent Acquisition Glossary and Processes
Talent acquisition encompasses the comprehensive HR processes involved in sourcing, attracting, screening, and hiring talent—including developing hiring plans, job descriptions, posting jobs, conducting interviews, and negotiating offers—with responsibilities varying by company size and often involving job requisition approval, job analysis, candidate sourcing, and application review.
How to Hire Employees: The Ultimate Guide
The guide emphasizes that hiring the right employee is a critical managerial function requiring a clear understanding of organizational needs, careful assessment of job requirements, and adherence to best hiring practices to ensure a good skills, work ethic, and cultural fit.
A Beginner's Guide to Applicant Management in a Small Business
This beginner's guide explains the comprehensive applicant management process for small businesses, detailing key HR tasks such as creating precise job descriptions, posting job ads, engaging candidates, screening resumes, conducting interviews, performing background checks, negotiating offers, onboarding, tracking hiring metrics, managing budgets, and ensuring compliance, all typically handled by a single person in small organizations.
The Job Offer: The Offer Letter [with Templates]
The article outlines the final step in hiring—extending a job offer—emphasizing the importance of promptly making a clear, enthusiastic phone call to the selected candidate that includes all key details such as start date, job title, compensation, and any contingencies, followed by sending a formal offer letter via email and awaiting their acceptance.