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Forbes
Forbes
Business
Nell Derick Debevoise, Contributor

Three Ways To Show Your Summer Interns Some Love, For Their Good And Yours

Leaders and recruiters alike are scrambling to attract the top talent to grow their businesses. So many of us need agile, values-aligned talent to do work now. In the short term, salaries may catch a candidate’s attention and attract new hires, but that won't last.

It's an alignment of skills and purpose that drives long term employee retention and growth.

 Are Interns Prospective Employees?

Are you considering a summer intern? Do you have one already lined up? Great! If part of your goal is to build your pipeline of potential full-time hires, interns are a great way to "try before you buy." A summer intern is a great way to fill a position where there is work that needs to be done now while also seeing if there is a long term fit of skill and purpose.

However, the truth is we've all been on one end or the other of a crappy internship experience. You know the one - you're getting coffee and making copies and wondering what happened to the professional development opportunities the job descriptions claimed.

Don't be that kind of internship this summer. Instead follow through and create a work environment that offers career development, a realistic job preview, and an environment where the right people (and potential best employees) will want to stay long term.

How to Support Your Summer Intern

We Can Help, the phrase is written on multi-colored stickers, on a brown wooden background. Business concept, strategy, plan, planning. getty

There are three powerful and ultimately cost-saving ways to support your intern.

#1 Provide Careful Project Oversight

Have a specific project that the intern is responsible for. This doesn't have to be all they're working on but if you're going to bring on an intern there should be a clear, coherent, cohesive task or set of tasks that they're charged with. This will help organize their days, keep them independent, and create autonomy in the role which ultimately leads to satisfaction. And by the way, you get some great work out of it. Careful project oversight will support success for both the intern and you.

Designate a project champion, this could be you or someone else on the team, who has the time necessary to support the new talent. A project champion is a vital role that requires probably 30 to 90 minutes a week to support and answer the intern's questions. This additional training and one on one mentorship will set the intern up with the necessary guidance and lead them down a path to success.

Provide a topic area expert. You do not have to designate a person to fill this role. Instead, it could be a list of online sources, webinars, podcasts, other industry or topical sites that you use to refer to when it comes to the topic your intern is working on. Of course, it could also be a colleague, a mentor of yours, an outside advisor or customer, someone who can really help stretch the interns thinking and answer questions on the topic they're working on.

#2 Provide A Peer Group

For a successful internship provide access to peers. Interns, unless they're part of a big cohort of other interns, are often acting navigating the system alone. Very few of us work well like that. One of the best ways you can support your intern is to find them, peers.

Peers can be either other interns or employees their age. If there is no one within your company who fits this description look for a group from their school who's interning in a similar industry that you can help them get together with formally or informally. You may have access to an industry group of interns through your customers or suppliers.

Think creatively to make sure that your intern has someone other than you and your team with whom they can socialize, share ideas and frustrations throughout the summer. You'll be glad you did.

#3 Provide Career Guidance

Providing career guidance might seem out of scope for an internship but we've seen it to be critical to success and satisfaction for interns. After all, in the ideal world, internships are designed to help people understand what they do and don't want to do in the future and where they want to do it.

If you're hoping that these interns become part of your permanent pipeline, it's to your advantage to help them critically think about all the reasons why your company is a great fit for them. Of course, if your company is not a good fit you also want to help them realize that because staying won't be a good win in the long term for anyone.

Near Peers

An effective way to provide career guidance is to connect the intern with a near peer, someone who's two to four years older than the intern at your company and working full time. Set them up for a few coffee chats over the course of the summer to share thoughts, hear what they're learning and share what their career path has been.

Coffee Chat Tour

Another way to do this is with a coffee chat tour, pick half a dozen people in different departments around your company. Again, they don't have to be very senior, two to 10 years older than the intern is ideal. Set up simple 30 minute chats with each employee. These could be in person or virtual these days.

Before they meet provide your intern with some standard questions that they can ask beyond, "what do you do and how did you get here?"

Provide questions like: What's the most exciting part of your day? What parts of your job do you wish you didn't have? What training do you wish you had in addition to what you did study?

By giving your intern some guidelines to make the conversations productive you'll be helping them gather useful information and critical elements they will need to make wise career decisions.

Multiracial friends girls and guys having fun laughing drinking coffee tea in coffeehouse, happy diverse young people talking joking sitting together at cafe table, multicultural friendship concept getty

Online Resources

Seek out additional conversation topics on the internet, by crowdsourcing friends and younger colleagues. Ask the young people in your life (niece, nephews, kids or neighbors) where they go online to inform their career goals, and then share those with your intern.

Of course, these efforts are going to take a little time. But having managed over 200 MBA and undergraduate interns for the last 10 years, I can tell you that these forms of support pay off royally in terms of the work product that's delivered. They also improve the likelihood that your intern will speak fondly of you with an employer and or return full-time if you discover they'd make for a great employee.

 The Upside of Supporting Your Intern

The upside of providing your intern with quality support has three elements:

Deliver Better Work 

First, they'll deliver better work over the summer thanks to the guidance they have in the engagement with peers and productive forward movement in their career. Positive reinforcement given to the right people pays off in hard work.

Better Experience

Secondly, they'll have a better experience which again makes them much more likely to be a great brand ambassador for you as an employer and or to consider your full time offer when it comes. To recruit the best talent, you have to be the best.

Clarity About the Future

And third, they'll be really clear about their future with you. Again, no one wants someone accepting an offer by default because they have been sitting at their table or in their inbox. You want them to understand why your company is such a cool place to be in life. It's the next phase of their career.

As for attracting the top talent and decreasing employee turnover rates, when an intern finds clarity before accepting an offer, it’s a win for both the employer and the intern.

 Best Practices Attract Qualified Applicants

Close-up Of A Human Hand Attracting White Human Figures With Horseshoe Magnet On Blue Background getty

Think creatively and strategically about how you might be able to provide these forms of support as well as which areas of support you might need or be able to partner on with outside training programs, networks or other groups. Especially for smaller companies, the internet provides vast resources that, if properly curated, can provide the support your intern needs to deliver their best work. Similarly, there are several partner organizations that can facilitate the recruitment, training, and/or mentoring processes to set your intern up for success.

If you’re going to invest the time in finding and managing an intern, don’t cut these final corners and leave them unsupported. You won’t get the work product or the talent pipeline that you’re hoping for without this crucial support!

Email us for a free guide to build an internship program that creates a robust talent pipeline of diverse, purpose-driven professionals who meet your needs. Request a free excerpt of my forthcoming book, Going First: An Invitation to Find the Courage to Lead Purposefully and Inspire Action, here.

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