We were planning to conduct a small workshop for business owners. There were lot of activities to be done – Like sending invitations, confirming attendance, booking venue, printing promotional materials, etc. Now, the problem was, we didn’t want to hire someone full-time just for this as it would involve more time and money. Fortunately, we came across few sites that help employers to hire interns who were looking for summer internship. It was win-win situation for both of us. They worked with us for 2 months and helped us with lot of small activities.
As an employer, hiring an intern has a lot of benefits apart from low costs. Hiring interns is an excellent way to build your company. Employees make up the company and it is paramount to have employees who are the right fit according to organisational values.
A typical job interview provides a day at the maximum with a prospective employee which may or may not be enough time to judge an individual on all parameters. This is especially true about hiring fresher’s who have no relevant experience and there is absolutely no definite way of predicting if the individual is going to succeed in the organisation. But offering internships adequately reduces this risk as it provides for a longer term to judge the performance.
Simply hiring on the basis of high grades or excellent extracurricular activities is a superficial technique. This is why many top companies including McKinsey and Royal Dutch Shell hire mainly through offering Pre Placement Offers to their interns.
Here are top 5 benefits of hiring interns for your company:
1. Fresh ideas: It is not uncommon for interns to provide new ideas or suggest an alternative approach to work which is much better than the current technique. Although most of the ideas are not what can be called “earth-shattering” but fresh ideas help erode a lot of biases that build up by working on the same type of projects over and over again without giving a second thought to improvisations or improvements. Since the students are new to the corporate life, they are eager to prove their mettle and this is one feature a company can put to good use.
2. Short Term Projects: It is not necessary to hire interns with an objective of placing them as full time employees in the end. Many students are willing to work in an organisation just for the sake of gaining work experience to add brownie points to their CVs and such individuals can be used to complete short term projects. Many start-ups are capitalising on this as most of the work that they have does not require a lot of technical expertise and only requires a sharp mind do get the job done.
3. Students are Tech Savvy: More often than not student interns in an organisation are more tech savvy than the regular employees which helps them do their work in a shorter time period. Be it a presence on social media or giving PowerPoint presentations, bets are the geeky intern will do it better than your favourite employee.
4. Improve company reputation: As mentioned earlier top companies generally recruit interns as a rule and it is a great way to improve brand value in top universities. However a top internship programme is necessary to hire the top talents.
5. Less pay, more work: Student interns are not very stingy about how much pay they receive with most of them concerned about the quality of the project that they get to work on. There are many students who would not think twice about foregoing a stipend altogether if they believe that the project helps them increase their knowledge and skills.
Internships are a mutually beneficial experience for both the recruiter and the recruited. It is not for nothing that there are so many websites dedicated to help students to find the right internships.
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A good performance at one’s internship may help the student bag that coveted job and even if it does not, there are a myriad of other benefits which make it impossible for students not to seek out an internship offer:
1. Knowledge development: Any working person would testify that a very small fraction of what he/she has learnt through theory in college significantly affects how they are performing today and the percentage keeps going south as one’s experience increases. A holistic knowledge about the job is more important which is easily gained in an internship.
2. Interpersonal Skill development: Just coming in contact with so many people in a company does wonders to a student’s confidence. And as young people have a natural tendency to get acquainted with as many people as they can get, shyness and hesitation automatically take a backseat in one’s minds.
3. Network development: The contacts formed during an internship can prove to be the building blocks of one’s careers. Along with helping to secure a job in the corresponding company, the contacts can be used as references too when job hunting elsewhere.
A study says that about 52 percent of undergraduate students go through internships. Of these 54% grab an internship through on campus interviews, 23 % find the internships using a job posting or from a resume database, 19% through a tailored job search which includes using ones contacts and 4% from other sources. But with the ultrafast growth rate of data on the internet (over 90% has been created in the last 2 years) a higher share of the ‘intern market’ is bound to shift online as is the case with everything else from e-commerce to e-learning.
Here is a list of the best websites to hire interns:
Networking sites are the best way to search for candidates since they make it easy to filter out people with the right qualifications.
1. AlmaConnect: Although as a recruiter you cannot directly post your requirements for hiring interns on this website, you can ask any of your employees who have an account to post it for you. All the major educational institutes in the country including the IITs and IIMs are registered on this site. This is fundamentally a site which connects people from the same Alma matter and also has students currently studying in those colleges. These current students should be the target audience as sites looking for a job or internship opportunity is of prime importance to them. The list of featured institutes on the website can be found on its homepage which boasts of over 2000 alumni communities.
2. LinkedIn Recruiter: What Google is to information search, LinkedIn is to job search. You can join a myriad of groups made exclusively for job searches and categorized according to region, industry and so on and so forth. Joining any of these groups will allow you to post for free. Additionally, to avail the opportunities of the large pool of candidates available on LinkedIn you can post jobs through LinkedIn Recruiter. To use this feature simply go to “Manage job posting” in the “accounts and settings” of your LinkedIn profile. This feature uses LinkedIn’s expertise to give you a targeted audience. For example you can specifically make your intern posting available for candidates who have a MBA degree or choose any such qualification in your candidates. You will have to pay only when the targeted audience ‘clicks’ on the ad to see the intern posting. The default price is Rs 42 per click but can be changed. Also the total budget can be specified so that the exercise does not hurt your pockets.
Free Websites To Hire Interns:
These websites have one aim i.e. to connect internship givers and internship seekers.
1. InternTheory: This website is a favourite with internship seekers because of its definitive follow up. While posting an internship, it asks for a variety of information regarding type of stipend which will be provided (variable, fixed etc.), company’s vision, start date and end date, type of candidate required, number of openings available. Overall, it pays a good amount of attention to both the employer’s and the employee’s needs. And the best part? Posting for an internship is absolutely free.
2. Internshala: This website is probably the most famous among internship seekers. It also boasts of a great pedigree of recruiters with names like PepsiCo, HSBC, Phillips and Uber regularly filling up their Internship quotas through the site. A search on Google or on social media sites like quora.com with the keyword ‘internships’ almost always return with Internshala as one of the top results. This website too allows companies to post internships without any fee or charges.
3. Twenty19: The website’s offerings of online courses along with internship opportunities help it attract students in large numbers who are generally always on the lookout for one of the either. Moreover they let you post internships for free. Reliance Industries Limited, Aditya Birla Group and HSBC are some high profile companies that hire interns using this website.
4. Letsintern: Another wonderful website to hire interns without having to shell out a single buck. There is a catch though. It only lets you post 3 internships for free. But with the website boasting about 40,00,000 students from 1,50,000 colleges one shouldn’t be complaining too much.
5. Hellointern: The website’s homepage has 3 distinctive categories to immediately catch the internship seeker’s eye namely featured internships, latest internships and trending events. Although registering as a company is free, you will have to pay to appear in its ‘featured internships’ list. A company email id is compulsory to register on the site as it does not accept public email ids like Gmail and Yahoo!
6. 10internship: Although not very pleasing to the eye, the website does its job quite efficiently. It shows internship offerings categorised according to place and role on its homepage itself making it easier for students to choose what they exactly want. Like most of the other websites, this allows you to post jobs or internships for free.
Sites For Hiring Interns Globally:
7. Internships: This is Chegg’s internship offering arm. Chegg is quite popular among students both in India and globally for the online tutoring services that it provides. Chegg has used all its experience in dealing with students to create this delightful website. And like Chegg, Internships.com offers a wide variety of services and articles to make hiring your dream intern easier and more fruitful. All of this is provided free of charge.
8. Looksharp: Another excellent website to search for global applicants. Looksharp offers two University Recruiting Products namely the ‘Looksharp Recruiter’ and ‘Looksharp Company Profile’. The company holds various conferences for the benefits of the students and employers as well. But posting for a job here is not free. The website offers different programs with the most basic starting at 99$ and offers a 30 day window to use its resources for finding the right intern. It boasts of enabling 10 million students to find the right jobs and internships in the last year alone and presents itself as the “all in one university recruiting platform”. A free demo can be requested.
Now that you have the intern that you were looking for, there are some things which should be kept in mind to improve the quality of the internship experience that a company offers. A competitive remuneration, a well-defined project and future employability are the top three features that interns look for in an internship and one of these things is often a necessity for students to be interested in a particular programme. On average, interns are paid a monthly stipend of Rs. 5000 in India.
Also, the best time to hire them is May-July or October- December when the vacations are about to or have begun. Avoiding the March-April exam time may cut down on some unnecessary recruitment headaches.
Please feel free to share your experience with hiring interns in comments section below.
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