SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Small Business — tracks feedback from small-business owners. We run the poll question each Thursday in our e-newsletter.
Last week, we asked: Does your business hire interns?
- Yes — 45.12%
- No – 40.24%
- No, but we’re considering doing so — 14.63%
Bringing on an intern for a summer or a semester can offer a variety of benefits for both your business and the young worker. It’s a great way for your team to get a new member with fresh ideas and perspectives since typically an intern is still in school or a recent graduate. Plus, you and your more experienced employees can share your expertise while helping the intern to gain work experience.
The key to a great intern relationship is making sure you know how to structure the job. Interns are not free labor and shouldn’t be assigned all the office grunt work. The U.S. Department of Labor has a fact sheet offering their guidelines. For some ideas on how to structure your internship opportunity or post an intern opening, check out community sites such as Intern Queen or visit the microsite created by the Society for Human Resource Management and Internships.com.
Sharlyn Lauby is the HR Bartender and president of ITM Group.
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As many responding small business owners already believe, and more are considering, internship programs are indeed a valuable resource – for both the employer and the intern. In fact, due to the collaborative nature of smaller enterprises, many interns enjoy working for, and learn more from, small business executives and owners. As opposed to the typical “coffee and copies” routine of interns at many large corporations, interns in a small team environment have far more opportunity to be mentored directly by decision makers and innovators.
At YouTern, we strongly encourage leaders of start-ups, small businesses and non-profits to consider serving as mentors, and also participate in what we call “reverse-mentoring” relationships – where the student becomes the teacher in areas critical to today's business environment (social media and mobile apps, for example).
If these small-team organizations don’t already have a mentoring/internship program in place, it’s quite easy to develop an effective one – and we’re here to help.
Thanks for weighing in, Mark. Interns are often a big help here at SmartBrief. Our own Sam Taute got his start with SmartBrief as an intern a few summers ago and was so great we hired him recently when a job opened up. I also know that my career has benefited from the experience and mentoring I received as an intern when I was younger.