Are You Tired Of Hearing About Interns?

Okay, so anyone who knows me is tired of my rants about the importance of internship programs to any recruiting strategy, so I decided I will instead write about the topic for now on. Despite that the economy is sluggish and gas prices appear to be soaring to $7 per gallon,
recruitment is still highly competitive. Particularly in disciplines like engineering where
the number of graduates with engineering degrees drops about 20 percent each year,
while the number of engineering positions continues to increase.

So, in order to get their attention start an internship program where you recruit freshman and sophomores in addition to upper classman. An internship program is a great way to build a talent pipeline and also drive employee retention because the program allows prospective full-time employees to test drive you as well.

One suggestion for those of you who don’t know where to being is to create a baseline job description for an intern who can work on cross-functional teams or for several people in one department. Of course you’ll need one dedicated manager so the intern doesn’t get lost but it’s a great way to introduce an internship program to your company while you determine where the immediate and long term need is for interns throughout the company. Another suggestion is not to focus on hiring the students with the best GPA from the best schools. Bring in a wide variety of candidates and hire based on fit…..I guarantee you will not regret it.

In the fall of 2006, we had an intern from Boston University named Evonne who interned for the Employer marketing team. She reported to one person but wound up working on a variety of projects for others (including me). I had enough exposure to her work and her personality to know that she was definitely somebody we needed to bring in full time if the opportunity arose. So, when a position opened this spring in our marketing department, she was the first person we thought of and as a group made a very quick decision to hire her.

Why? Because we knew she was dedicated, professional and thorough and that she has great attitude and was a great fit for a high energy culture.

Evonne has showed up and blown away some very high expectations we had for her. I think a huge reason for her success is that she interned for us so we knew what we were getting and she did too. Evonne could also have graduated at the top of her class or the bottom of it….it didn’t matter because she’d already shown she was more than equal to the task of working for Experience full time! So, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Moving on to non sequiturs, I realize I was was remiss in congratulating the Celtics on their win in the NBA finals in my last post! For anyone who watched you finally got to see what how good Pierce really is and how on-point Shaq was when he named him The Truth!

Enough out of me.