I hired my very first paid intern in 2008 when I was marketing manager at Snow Valley, an e-commerce agency of 60 people. I kept hiring them when Snow Valley got acquired by MICROS in 2011 and there were 5,000 of us. And I was still hiring them after Oracle bought MICROS in 2014 and the interns were joining a global team of 130,000.
Interns can be A Very Good Thing for every size of business and I love them. One day I'll get around to writing the Why You Should Love Interns As Much As I Do article.
But it doesn't always work out. I've seen internships fail in a lot of different ways over the years, but when they fail the outcome is always the same for the employer; you miss out on fantastic work and creative ideas that could make you and your team look good, and you're wasting the money that you're investing in the intern.
So here are ten mistakes that I've seen employers make and how I either made them myself or tried to avoid them (and a big thank you to the 27 fantastic interns that I've hired over the years, many of whom kindly contributed ideas to this list - Ben Sabin, Susannah Grieve, Eliott Simco*ck, Matt Nicholls, Tasmin Boyce, Rebecca Adlington).
Fail #1 - The team hasn't bought in to having an intern: I'm putting this one first because it's the least forgivable mistake. Yet it happens all the time: a manager or director brings a new intern over to a bank of desks one Monday morning and says; "This is Anna and she's our new intern!" Half the team immediately thinks the intern is there to take their jobs. Someone else is on a call and definitely doesn't have time for interns - they won't speak to the intern for the whole year. If the intern is lucky, one team member sees an opportunity for offloading some work and will take the intern under their wing.
I'm being a bit extreme here but all of my interns knew someone who had spent the best part of a year not feeling welcome or part of a team. Imagine spending 250+ days working with people who don't understand why you're there. I know I'd struggle to do a good job.
The worst example I ever saw of this was an intern being landed on a team member who immediately saw her as a threat. Every time the intern made a mistake, the manager would share it with the team; "She made such a mess of that PowerPoint deck - it took me two hours to sort it out!" without ever mentioning his six years' experience versus the six weeks that she'd been in the job. The intern became more and more disengaged until she was basically doing nothing.
How to avoid it: At the very, very least, interns need to be properly introduced to the team, either in a meeting or on a call, with clarity on what the intern is doing and for whom. But the most effective way to make an intern feel involved and boost their contribution is to involve the team in the hiring process. Ask for suggestions on what the intern could do, invite one or more members to represent during selection, assign a supervisor or manager well in advance so they have time to think about how they get things off to a good start. As a colleague often said to me; "You don't get a second chance to make a first impression" - that works both ways and if you don't get it right on Day One it's going to be hard to reset.
Fail #2 - No job spec or not enough work: It's easy to see how it happens; someone suggests getting an intern, or maybe they're offered one. The suggestion is met with huge enthusiasm and the ideas come thick and fast: "They can give Tina a hand with the customer conference" "They could work on the competitor research project" "They could do my admin" (that last one tends to come disguised as something else but this is what it boils down to). All of which amounts to a vague promise of a few weeks or days of work.
If you don't have a job specification for your intern then you risk a whole slew of problems: not enough work for the intern and the intern sitting around doing nothing; someone else loading your intern with work even though you're paying them; the intern not meeting deadlines because they're cherry-picking work from here, there and everywhere. It comes down to the same thing; you lose out.
How to avoid it: Write a job spec for your intern. It can be short, but it will encourage you to refine your own understanding of why you're hiring an intern and what they can do for you. It also allows you to ensure that there's enough work to keep them busy five days a week (and if there isn't, you have time to fill the gaps before they arrive). Lastly, it allows you to be very clear with the intern so you can fairly hold them to account if they're not living up to expectations.
Fail #3 - No feedback: "You could work on being a bit more proactive" is potentially useful advice if an intern hears it in week 12. It's not so useful if they hear it on their last day. Most of my interns knew someone who had spent a year at a company without ever having a constructive conversation about their performance. Some got no feedback at all.
How to avoid it: Have regular reviews with your intern. Weekly one-to-one meetings might seem onerous but I found that they helped me as much as they helped the intern. Quarterly reviews are good for a discussion of how things are going on both sides. You can also use quarterly meetings to set bigger projects that the interns can return to during quieter moments. (Any of my interns reading this are now thinking "What quieter moments?")
Fail #4: Limited understanding of their work - "I need you to make a list of Twitter accounts" is very different to "The boss has asked us to think about influencer marketing and one idea is to look at which Twitter accounts have the most followers that would be relevant to us so we could potentially work with them." The chances of you ending up with a useful list are much, much higher with the second option.
And this is just a tiny, task-based example. There are interns whose entire job doesn't obviously connect to what everyone else is doing and they work in a mystified fog for months on end. "No clarity of the business impact of the tasks they were assigned, therefore they felt like it was just busy work. Most likely it was," was how Ben, my very first ever intern, described his friends' experience to me.
How to avoid it: At the very least, take a few minutes to explain the context of the role, and of any task, to the intern. Whether it's a 30 minute job or a year-long project, if they don't understand how it fits in they're unlikely to deliver the quality of work you need.
Fail #5: Poor hiring process - Four things can happen during the recruitment process for an intern: A) you get the right person, B) you get a person, C) you get the wrong person, D) you get no person.
In my experience, you can still salvage B) and C) and you can still mess up A) after the intern has arrived and is working for you.
But you stand a far greater chance of success if you get the hiring process right. I could write a whole article on hiring alone, so I'll cut to the chase here and tell you that there are four things to think about if you want to know how to avoid a poor hiring process:
- Invite the right candidates to the assessment day. There's no sinking feeling like realising you've got 12 Graphic Design students in the room when you're looking for a PR assistant. Start in September by writing the job spec, advertise on LinkedIn and work with your chosen universities to get your vacancies onto their job boards, and then let the applications flood in until a January closing date. Then get busy; sift the CVs, set up telephone interviews, create the shortlist and invite the successful 6, 12, 20 to an assessment day in February (depending on how many interns you're hiring).
- Know exactly what you're looking for. Give every assessor a scorecard and have someone ready to crunch the numbers, so you have data to help your decision. To get A) you sometimes need to take risks. On three occasions I took a gamble with an intern - they were fantastic in the areas that really counted but maybe a bit short on something else - and every time they repaid me by making an outstanding contribution during their year. But if I hadn't been clear on what we needed, or I hadn't had the data to back me up when I took that punt, we'd have gone with B). Not the end of the world but it won't get you the stellar talent and a year's worth of exceptional work.
- Treat it as a two-way assessment. You're evaluating the candidates but they also need to evaluate you. One of my interns described how two friends were recruited into a company where they were expected to proactively seek out work to fill their time. One loved it and thrived. The other hated it and did less work as the year went on until he wasn't doing anything. If you're upfront about how your program runs, you minimise the risk of disillusionment.
- Be quick. The good candidates will be going to several assessment centres and the stars will get snapped up by someone else unless you can make a decision quickly. My advice is to hold your review meeting as soon as the candidates have left the building and make the offer as soon as you're sure (let everyone sleep on it if needed but definitely don't leave it more than a couple of days).
Fail #6 - No hiring process: the big sister of the poor hiring process is no hiring process at all. I'm not being naive here; I know that interns can come into a business through a variety of ways. However, if you're going to give someone work experience for a significant period of time then you have a duty to show them what working life involves and that starts with an interview. Even if it's Hobson's choice and the identity of the intern is already decided, an interview is a good way of setting expectations on both sides.
How to avoid it: Stage some kind of interview - even if your intern is the CEO's son, if they're going to be working with you for more than three months, start their first day with a "this is what we're looking for/what are your aspirations?"-type conversation. It helps you to understand what they might be good at/what they're expecting (it's often not what you think they're expecting) and it helps you to put them in the picture of what they need to contribute.
Fail #7 - Poor manager/no manager/too many managers: If I made a list of "people who definitely need a good manager" I'd put interns in the top three, just below Premiership footballers and boybands.
If you're 20 years old and you've never worked in an office before, you need one person who has been given the responsibility of helping you find your feet quickly. A person to talk to about the work or any questions or worries. And yet so many interns either don't have a manager at all, or are "managed" by five people, or have someone inexperienced who micromanages, or isn't great at communication, or isn't interested.
(By the way, I'm all for inexperienced managers taking on interns. "Give management experience to members of your team" will be right there in the Sarah Merker Top 10 Reasons to Hire an Intern (article for another day). But don't forget to manage the manager.)
How to avoid it: Assign a single line manager to the intern. Make sure that the manager-to-be is at the assessment day and ensure that their manager is managing them on becoming a better coach and mentor. The line manager should help prioritise the intern's work as other people bring tasks to their desk. Lots of assistance may be needed in months one and two and then it will tail off, apart from one big inevitable dramatic scene in months three or four when seven people suddenly ask the intern to do something for them on the same day and the manager has to adjudicate.
Fail #8 - Not invited to meetings or asked to contribute ideas: I really want to say "WHY? WHY HIRE AN INTERN AND NOT ASK THEM FOR IDEAS?" here but the truth is that I've done it myself. I've held round robins on team calls to canvass opinions and gather ideas and not asked the intern for their input. It was usually because I was avoiding putting them on the spot with no warning, but you have to put them on the spot. If you've hired the right intern, they'll have ideas at least 80% of the time.
Here's the thing: I haven't had one single bad idea from an intern in over ten years of managing them. Not one. And I've had lots of very brilliant ideas.
How to avoid it: Always invite the interns to appropriate meetings. By appropriate I mean two things; either the meeting will be directly interesting and useful for them (such as team meetings), or they have the time to join a meeting about something they're not directly working on. And encourage them to speak up from Day One. If the intern makes a good suggestion in a one-to-one, ask them to voice it in a weekly or monthly team meeting and get them in the habit of suggesting and selling ideas to the group.
Fail #9 - Limited learning and exposure to a variety of tasks: I'm going to cut the employer some slack on this one and say that this has to work both ways. An intern who tells you on their last day that they would have liked to have gone to a sales meeting has to take responsibility for not making that happen (unless they had indeed found a sales person willing to take them along and the manager vetoed it five times).
How to avoid it: At the start of the year and in every quarterly review, ask the intern to make a list of things they want to learn about and then ask them how they could achieve that. You'd be amazed how many times loose ends meet - your intern wants to learn about PR/video production/search engine marketing and your PR/video/SEO agency would love a helping hand for a day. It will be one day out of 250+ for you but it might reveal a useful talent, or it could be the day that inspires them onto a successful career path that ends with an OBE.
(I’m not joking about the last one, by the way. I was with the late, great Diane Canady one day in 2013 and I mentioned the Honours’ List. “Two of mine got gongs this year,” she said casually, referring to two of her former interns who had gone on to entrepreneurial success. It's been a dream of mine ever since.)
Fail #10 - "Just an intern": If I could change one thing about my time with my interns so far, I'd ban the word intern as soon as they entered the building on their first day. We had an intern handbook that said "we consider you to be an integral part of our team and not an intern" but if I was treating them like a marketing assistant (and I always was) then that's how they should have been introducing themselves.
How to avoid it: Give them a job title that doesn't include the word 'intern' and make clear that the words "just an intern" are banned.
I'll conclude by saying that I've tried to focus this piece on commercial benefits - how the manager and organisation can avoid the pitfalls and get the most return from investing in an intern program. But there are countless other benefits of taking on interns - again, a post for another day.
What about you? Have you managed interns and made mistakes along the way? Were you an intern that had a less than stellar experience? Feel free to share your thoughts.
