Are your interns valuable contributors or low-priority grunts?

Ted Bauer is a contributing author to College Recruiter

By Ted Bauer, contributing author to College Recruiter

Let’s be blunt here: a bad, or poorly-contextualized, hiring process can cost you lots of money and time. As a result, internal recruitment (essentially promotion from within or adjustment of roles) has gained some favor in recent years.

One of the best ways to approach internal recruitment is how you handle interns. An organization’s approach to interns typically resides somewhere between these two extremes:

• Interns are valuable contributors for the entire duration of their stay.
• Interns predominantly do low-priority grunt work that has to get done.

In most organizations, it’s a mix of those two approaches — although companies would be wise to move closer to the first bullet point. Why? There are a number of advantages:

• “Get them while they’re young:” Interns are usually younger employees, meaning you can drive your processes, expectations, and workflows into them before they’ve had different experiences at other organizations. This reduces pushback and/or “doing things their way” that sometimes can happen with a late-20s hire who’s worked at a few places already.
• Knowledge of process and culture: Interns usually have one main area they work within, but often touch different projects as help is needed. As a result, they can often have an eye towards culture and process throughout an organization that even full-time employees working in a specific silo may lack.
• Cheaper: Apologies for a slightly controversial argument, but converting an intern to a full-time hire is usually happening at a lower salary band. Consider two choices here: you could hire a slightly-more experienced person, for more money, who knows nothing about your culture and will necessarily take time to adjust. Or you could hire someone for less money, with opportunity for advancement, who already knows the people and processes inherent in the work getting done. Scenario “B” is usually more attractive to employers of all sizes.

So, with the value of intern conversion clear, the question becomes: how do you make sure your organization is moving the right interns over to full-time opportunities?

Well, in partnership with our friends at exaqueo, we’re co-hosting the 10th College Recruiting Bootcamp on Thursday, December 8th at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission office, which is connected to Amtrak’s Union Station.

Our College Recruiting Bootcamps each provide an intensive and enjoyable day of training for talent acquisition and other human resource leaders. Attendees enjoy fast-paced, interactive learning environments because we limit keynotes and presentations to 20 minutes and panel discussions to 40 minutes. This lightning fast pace forces presenters, panel moderators, and panelists to be razor focused on their topics.

Our host for the day, the SEC, will share their successes in recruiting college talent, along with best practices from expert practitioners and other industry leaders. And, thanks to our friends at Amtrak, attendees who wish will also get a special, behind-the-scenes tour of historic Union Station. Oh, and we’ll end the day with a cocktail reception in a breathtaking area of Union Station.

The first section of the day will be about this exact topic: intern conversion.

The cost is only $95.00 and includes snacks, lunch, Amtrak tour, cocktail reception, and a full day of insights. You cover travel and bring an appetite to learn. And, you promise to act on what you’ve learned.

Seating is limited. You can learn more and register here.