How to Manage Interns

Once an optional stop on the career path, internships are increasingly becoming de rigeur for young people – often high school, undergraduate, and graduate students – looking for hands on experience in a wide range of fields. Internship programs can also be a great resource for companies, particularly start-ups that might not have the same type of talent draw as their larger counterparts.

However legal requirements, generation gaps, and different hiring criteria make managing interns a whole different animal than managing employees. These factors can make it tricky to launch an internship program without encountering problems. Here are some tips on how to structure a program and manage the interns to everyone's advantage.

How to Manage Interns: Know What You Want

When you decide to bring interns on board your company, you need to have a really clear vision of why you're creating the internship program. This will both allow you to gauge its success and keep you from inadvertently exploiting your interns. You need to ask yourself, am I starting an internship program "because [we're] shorthanded and want someone to do the scutwork around the office?" says Carroll Lachnit, the executive editor of Workforce Management, an Irvine, California-based HR magazine. If so, she continues, "that may turn out to be a really unpleasant internship experience for everyone."

Here are three things that internship programs can do for your company:

• Human Resources Hack: "Internships are really cheap ways of interviewing people," says Jo-Ellen Pozner, an assistant professor of business management at the University of California, Berkeley. Hiring someone full-time and then discovering you've made an error can lead to costly payouts and lost time spent replacing the hire that didn't work out. The advantage of an internship program is, according to Pozner, "you can essentially use an internship as a 3-month job interview."
  
  If you have enough foresight, you can groom interns and later choose the most promising ones to help you meet needs and overcome obstacles that your company has yet to encounter. Lachnit says, "you'd have to look into the future of your organization a couple of years and say, 'okay a year from now, or two years from now, I'm going to have an entry-level position and I want to have this kind of person good to go for that job.'"
• Breeding Brand Advocates: An internship program not only allows you to test for aptitude and cultural fit among the students who put in their time with you. It can also get the word out to your consumers and to other potential employees. Pozner notes that, "internship programs are wonderful marketing tools, particularly if the internship experience is managed properly." It also helps if your interns are of the same age and background as your target demographic.
  
  This word of mouth boost that originates with the interns' positive work experience can be particularly valuable to a start-up or another company that "doesn't really have the recruiting power that a Microsoft or a Google has, but they're great companies to work for," says Gagan Biyani, co-founder of StartupRoots, a non-profit that matches smart college students with up and coming companies. Biyani also has experience with managing interns at Udemy, the online teaching and learning start-up he runs while not working on StartupRoots.
• Building Ties With Your Community: Starting an internship program can be a great way to give back to your local community by giving underprivileged students a chance to boost their career prospects and connections. Depending on your line of work, having a local community that has a positive impression of your business can make or break it. Additionally, even if you're too strapped for cash to hire the interns once they graduate, you can still keep in touch, and they may prove to be valuable contacts in your industry.

Despite all these potential advantages of an internship program, it's important to keep in mind that the program is supposed to be largely for the interns' advantage and edification. Lachnit says that if you take on an intern "with the expectation that this is going to save me some work, you're going to be profoundly disappointed."

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How to Manage Interns: What to Provide for Your Interns

The main thing interns should take away from an internship at your company is practical work experience that in some way matches their interests. Biyani sees internships as a supplement to the undergraduate education system, filling in the knowledge gaps by teaching tangible skills.

Recent graduates "don't know how to use Excel after they get out of college, they can hardly make a PowerPoint presentation," he says. "They sure as hell can't go in front of a large group of people and speak like you would at a company presentation." So Biyani grants interns at Udemy the freedom to choose tasks that interest them, such as public relations or business development, and take on projects that a larger company wouldn't risk turning over to somebody so green. In fields such as design or journalism, a courteous employer will give interns some opportunity to accumulate clips that they can show to future employers.

In addition to the on the job experience they receive, StartupRoots organizes mixers and educational talks by entrepreneurs for its interns. The Silicon Valley crowd schools the college students on learning from failure, developing a great product, and starting a company, among other things.

You should also give the interns the opportunity to acquire a variety of skills. "Keep an open mind about an intern's talents and abilities," recommends Cari Sommer, the co-founder of Urban Interns, a website that matches small businesses with interns and other part-time assistants. "You may have hired them for a specific function and be pleasantly surprised to learn that your intern actually has a great passion and ability in another area of your business."

But best of all, from the interns' perspective, if you don't have the means or the intention to hire any of your interns, you should at least connect some of the most promising candidates with colleagues in your field and help them find their footing after they conclude their internship.

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How to Manage Interns: Providing Mentorship and Advice

Even if you have a hands off management style, when you bring on interns, you have to make sure that they have at least one point person, if not more, that they can go to with their questions. "It's really wrong to strand an intern without someone who's invested in what they're doing for that time that they're with you," says Lachnit.

However, while there should be a minimum of one person who shows each intern the ropes, it's important for the interns to interact with people in many different branches of the company so they can acquire a variety of skills to match their interests. Biyani believes that "everybody should be involved in teaching the interns." At Udemy the interns have one core mentor but move around between advisors learning different skills. This has the added benefit of not burning anyone out.

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