Tips for Hiring an Intern for Your Small Business

Your Filipino small business is growing, and you need additional help. As such, now may be a good time to hire an intern.

Internships in finance, management, and other business areas are readily available across the Philippines. If you want to hire an intern, you need to plan ahead. By doing so, you can ensure that your business can reap the benefits of a best-in-class internship program.

Why Should Your Small Business Offer Internships?

Offering internships provides a golden opportunity to hire talent without a significant financial investment. You can recruit college or university students who can complete an internship, gain hands-on experience, and earn school credit. Or, you can pursue graduates who can use an internship toward a career with your company.

You can offer myriad internship opportunities. For instance, if you need financial reporting and analysis help, you can seek out accounting interns. On the other hand, if you need an extra hand to build and maintain a website, you can hire a web design intern. Each internship opportunity you offer promotes your brand and lets you engage with industry talent.

Let’s not forget about how your internship program can distinguish your company from its rivals. Your internship program can help your company attract talent. In the long run, your internship program can also help your company become an industry leader.

How to Hire an Intern for Your Small Business

Clearly, there’s a lot to like about providing internships. Yet, doing so can be tricky, particularly for small business owners who are doing so for the first time. If you plan ahead, you can determine the best course of action to recruit interns. Plus, you can develop an internship strategy that helps your company grow.

Start hiring interns — here are five tips to help you do just that.

1. Create Detailed Internship Descriptions

Figure out what you want from your ideal intern. From here, you can create internship descriptions and use them to connect with candidates. 

Explain the responsibilities associated with an internship. For example, you may want to hire a marketing intern who can develop promotional materials in conjunction with multiple business stakeholders. In your internship description, describe the promotional materials the intern will help produce. You should also provide details about the business stakeholders the intern will work with to create these materials. Additionally, highlight any training you’ll provide to interns. And if you offer compensation, explain how much you’ll provide.

In your descriptions, share information about the benefits of choosing your internship over others, such as the compensation. Be honest and upfront with candidates. That way, a candidate can make an informed decision about whether your internship matches their expectations.

2. Be Proactive

Search far and wide for interns. Use LinkedIn and other social media to promote your internship opportunities. Furthermore, encourage your employees to inform anyone they know about your company’s internships.

Remain persistent as you promote your internships. Track the results of your internship recruitment. Establish goals for your recruitment and find out why candidates may be attracted to certain internship opportunities over others. You can then use these insights to ensure your internship program consistently hits the mark with candidates.

3. Provide Comprehensive Training

Empower interns with opportunities to learn as much as possible. To do so, offer an in-depth training program. This ensures interns can discover how to perform a wide range of tasks. For example, you can provide Microsoft Office training to help HR interns complete various tasks. Comparatively, if you hire sales interns, you can teach them the ins and outs of Salesforce and other sales tools and software your sales team uses.

At the same time, your interns can become key contributors to your company’s success. They can help your business guard against understaffing and other productivity and performance issues.

Craft a training program tailored to the responsibilities associated with an internship. Typically, it helps to get employee feedback during the program’s development. Also, you can include employees in intern training. Workers can help interns understand how to handle various responsibilities. Moreover, they can help interns get the most value out of a training program. 

4. Offer Incentives

Consider incentives to motivate interns. For instance, you can provide interns with the flexibility to work remotely. You can give interns opportunities to participate in industry training sessions or conferences as well. These incentives won’t break your company’s budget. Meanwhile, they can help you set your internship opportunities apart from others.

Reward top-performing interns. You can work with your interns to create goals. Next, you can help interns determine how to achieve these goals and offer support as they try to accomplish them. As interns perform at peak levels, you can provide them with bonuses or other performance-based incentives. You may even consider offering them a permanent role with your business. 

5. Collect and Analyze Feedback

Use surveys and questionnaires to discover the best ways to hire interns. These allow you to learn from your employees and find out what they think of your company, its operations, its culture, and more. Your employees can provide insights into your business’s strengths and weaknesses. And you can use these insights to find ways to develop an effective internship program.

Along with conducting surveys and questionnaires, host regular meetings with workers. Learn from your personnel and how they believe your company can engage with internship candidates. You can then incorporate their feedback into your internship strategy.

Don’t Wait to Hire Interns for Your Small Business

Your Filipino small business can hire quality interns at any time. First, build your internship strategy and use it to identify and recruit quality interns. Then, evaluate your strategy’s results and explore ways to improve internship recruitment. Finally, you can establish and maintain an internship strategy that delivers exceptional results long into the future.