Revamping Your Internship Program: Turning Seasonal Interns into Long-Term Employees
A well-structured internship program can be a pipeline for future full-time hires. This blog explores how to design an internship experience that engages interns, builds their skills, and positions your company as an attractive long-term career option. For help finding talent with long-term potential, connect with PrideStaff Financial.
Provide real work assignments:
The best way to engage interns and get them to keep your company top of mind is to give them real work assignments that allow them to build their skills. Work assignments should be valuable to your company and fill the entire work term. Feedback from interns indicates that real work assignments play a leading role in determining intern satisfaction. You can guarantee that hiring managers provide real work assignments by checking job descriptions, emphasizing the importance of real work assignments during manager/mentor orientation sessions, and communicating with interns frequently throughout the work term to determine how they perceive what they are doing.
Assign an intern manager:
Having a dedicated manager for your intern program is the best way to ensure that it runs smoothly and stays focused on your criteria for success. It also ensures that the interns have consistency with communication and challenging work to increase their skills. If your program isn’t big enough to warrant a dedicated full-time staff member, one short-term solution is to ask a part-time employee to take on this responsibility for incentives. This gives the interns a “go-to” person and gives you and your staff a break from the many daily tasks involved in running a program of any size.
Get creative:
New-hire panels are one of the best ways to showcase an organization to interns as a great place to work. These are panels of five or six people who were hired as new grads within the last three years. They act as panelists in a meeting of interns, giving a brief summary of their background and then answering questions from the intern audience. Your interns get insights about your organization from your new hires—people who they perceive are like themselves and who they consequently view as credible sources of information.
Offer training:
Providing students with access to in-house training is a tangible way to show students you are interested in their development. You may also want to consider providing interns with information about outside classes and experiences in the community that can help them continue to build their skills. Many students will be interested in attending during their work term to take care of some electives and/or get a little ahead of the hours they need to graduate. If you have the budget, you may also want to consider paying the tuition for courses they take while working for you, as it will earn you points with interns.
PrideStaff Financial’s highly skilled staffing consultants are ready to support your hiring needs. Contact us today to see how we can help you hire skilled accounting & finance professionals.
