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You Don’t Need an Internship Program to Hire an Intern
Someone on your team suggests bringing on an intern next summer. It sounds like a good idea until the practical questions start.
Do we have enough work to keep someone busy? Who has time to manage them? Do we have the budget? How can we have an intern without a big-time internship program?
For smaller companies, those questions can kill the idea quickly. But they’re often based on an outdated picture of what an internship has to look like: 40 hours a week, a full summer, a formal recruiting process and enough planned work (or offsite activities) to fill every day.
At Aventi Group, we’ve learned that you don’t need any of that. You need a few projects, a reasonable number of hours and someone willing to provide a little structure along the way.
Start with the work you actually have
One of the most common objections to hiring an intern is, “We don’t have enough work for them.”
That may be true if you’re trying to fill 40 hours every week. But look at the projects your team keeps pushing to next month.
Research. Competitive analysis. Content. Proposal support. Documentation. Internal process cleanup. There is usually meaningful work available; it just may not add up to a full-time job.
Our interns at Aventi have worked on exactly those kinds of projects.
The best assignments aren’t busywork, either. Give an intern a question to answer or a problem to solve and let them own it. They get something tangible to point to at the end of the experience, and your team gets useful work completed.
Make the internship fit the company
Once you stop assuming an internship has to be full-time, the rest becomes easier.
A micro-internship might be 10 hours a week for six to ten weeks. It can be built around one project instead of a summer’s worth of tasks. And supervision doesn’t have to mean someone looking over their shoulder all day. Clear expectations, a short weekly check-in and access to people who can answer questions can go a long way.
Cost can be more flexible than many companies realize, too. Many universities provide funding for students taking unpaid or underpaid internships. One of our Aventi interns received just under $4,000 through their university’s guarantee program and handled roughly 90% of the paperwork themselves.
Suddenly, the question isn’t “Can we afford to run an internship program?”
It’s “Is there a project here that could give a student meaningful experience while helping our team?”
That’s a much easier question to answer.
Give someone a real opportunity
There’s a benefit here that goes beyond getting something off your backlog.
Smaller organizations can give students access and ownership they might not get inside a large formal internship program. They can own a real project, meet senior people, understand how different parts of a business work and leave with something they can genuinely say they built.
You don’t need a polished program to provide that experience.
You just need to make it worthwhile.
If you’ve considered hiring an intern but assumed your company was too small, too busy or didn’t have the budget, we put together the practical version of how we’ve made it work at Aventi.
Download The Micro-Internship Playbook.
It covers how to structure the engagement, find funding, choose the right projects, supervise without creating another full-time job and get a summer internship up and running.
