Hiring Interns

[Elenny]

Does anybody have any experience hiring interns for their business? Is this a good idea, or is it not worth the hassle?

I know a lot of high school and college students are willing to intern to get school credit, experience, and learn a trade, but I guess I am more concerned about providing value for them, since I don't want to be considered a slave driver.

This is all a vague idea right now, so as you guys provide input I might come up with more specific questions.

As always, thank you for helping me get through another chapter of life and business!

[dcaldwell]

Our local college had a placement programme, so we took advantage hiring for entry-level office support and programming work. The college made it seem they were manufacturing workers who could hit the ground running. The "kids" we hired displayed little regard for showing up on-time, and were generally unable to transfer their classroom knowledge to the real world. We basically had to micro-manage them for the term they were with us. One we ended up firing within a month. That's not to say they were all bad apples. We did run across some self-starters that we ended up hiring after they finished schooling, but they were usually had more life experience.

[Love]

Yea for you for thinking about providing value! Yea, the interns of the world thank you. So what is it exactly, that you would like interns to do?

I was just an intern, and while there were valuable moments, there were periods in which I thought I was given busywork and felt like "screw this."
But it doesn't have to be that way at all and interns can be very valuable to an organization for running daily routines and bringing fresh insight.

Those are my 2 cents!

[Interpreneur]

Elenny,

I like the fact that you are concerned about providing value to the interns even before starting the hiring process. I think that is a big part of finding success with an internship program.

Even if you have to assign them busy work (which is the reason why most people hire interns), if you can find a way to reward them for their effort by actually teaching them something that they will use later in life, you will have happy worker bees, and perhaps future employees.

When I was an intern a long time ago I had a really good supervisor who did his best to keep my work relevant to what I wanted to learn, but there was another supervisor who used his interns for coffee runs and to clean up the office. Then he would wonder why they would all quit after a week or two.