A few years ago, we started a very intentional internship program. Our goal was to have two interns a semester, every semester, fall, spring, and summer, even if we didn’t think we needed them at the time. We are going on our fifth consecutive semester of having interns, and I wanted to share some thoughts about it over two episodes. This episode, we will talk about the why of our internship program, and in a future episode, we’ll talk about the what and the how of successful internships. So why do we do internships and why will we continue this largely successful program? The top two reasons are community involvement and talent development. The first reason, and the most important reason is future talent identification and development. There are not many other scenarios in which you will get to see how someone works and fits in with your company culture before you truly commit to them. Internships are commitments for a semester alone. So, if they are a dud culturally or they don’t know how to work hard, you are not committed in the long term. You get to know people not just as a resume, as people. And this is a huge help in understanding whether they are a good fit culturally or not.
A bad hire can set a small business back months or years, and this is a good way to help minimize the risk. But you also get to find out what’s important to them and if you are a good fit for them. Some people will just take a job and then be unhappy because they’re not a good fit for the job. This is a disservice to everyone involved. And you get an idea of their talent. But not just their current talent level, you can really think about their potential and work towards helping them reach that potential in a way more flexibly than you could with someone that is hired as staff. Because of the cost of interns on the balance sheet, you can be way more flexible with their assignments and opportunities than a normal staff member. You are also able to train them in how you do business so that you get to have a hand in developing how they approach their work and their craft. And also importantly, it fulfills our mission. Part of our mission at Adelsberger Marketing is to have a culture that values our community. Internships are a great way to invest in your community. Most of our interns – 99% of them – come from local institutions or live locally. A good internship can help shape the future of a student by giving them real-world work experience that looks good on a resume and real-world skills that helps future employers see their potential. It can also help students think through what they want to do in life. Being able to fulfill our mission in this way is a great way to help our local colleges and universities fulfill their missions, and they have become great mutually beneficial relationships.
And while those are the two main whys that we do internships here at Adelsberger Marketing, here are a few more. Three times a year, Adelsberger Marketing gets to practice onboarding. In a firm our size, we might hire every year or every other year, which does not give us a lot of chances to perfect our onboarding practices. And without interns, every time we practice onboarding, it would be on a staff hire, which is a much more costly endeavor if we mess it up. With interns, we get to practice onboarding at least two people three times a year. This has given us a huge opportunity to dial in and constantly improve our onboarding process. When your onboarding process is good, it allows new folks to get a fast start to work and quickly align with company culture. Internships also allow us to grow our network of influence. Assuming all goes well, we just created six new advocates for our company every year. People whose lives we have had a positive impact on and will fondly think of us as they continue their career journeys. This added network can help us in a few ways. Referral for potential internships, so especially in the years surrounding their internship, they might point friends to us, which will help us grow our pool of potential candidates. But also, as they grow and are more successful, they might land a job that requires some outside contractors to complete some work. And we hope that means they’ll think about us.
Internships also help our staff develop leadership skills. Each of our interns spend time with all of our staff members, and this puts us in a position to help educate these students. And teaching is a form of leadership. Having to explain why and how you do your work helps you consider and internalize those ideas, which I think will make you more effective in those tasks. And depending on the intern, they may be largely assigned to a specific staff member for oversight. This gives the staff member a chance to work on things like instruction, direction giving, and delegation, things that in an organization of our size, they might not always get to work on.
And finally, it helps us deal with failure. We had one intern that was a failure, and there was co-fault there, and it gave us a chance to learn from it. And hopefully that intern was able to learn from it as well. But it’s helped us better select interns and better prepare future interns for success. I would encourage you to look at interns as an opportunity to better position your organization for success. There’s a good chance it will reveal your culture for what it really is, good or bad. And it can be a strain at moments, but the results are special. We plan to continue to do our internship program for as long as I’m running the company. An internship program is a test of your culture. It will help reveal some weak spots and push you to make your environment better for all the people that work in it. In the growing competition for talent, it is going to help you develop more and more opportunities to build relationships and secure talent. What is not to like?
If you need help thinking through an internship program or you have other questions, feel free to reach out. If you found this episode helpful, text it to a friend. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast.
