The Importance of Hiring Interns
By Andrew Parker - July 20, 2022

Once your business has grown to a certain level, there is a good chance that you are going to have a bunch of office work for which you don’t need licensed or specially qualified staff. The quality of staff you have might find the work repetitive, dry, and rather boring. In fact, using your staff to do such jobs can be called a waste of their time and it greatly reduces their efficiency to be able to do greater, more complex work. All the same, the tasks hold great professional importance and cannot be ignored. Smart businesses catch on to this issue and fill the gap with interns.

Getty Images/DigitalVision/Luis Alvarez

You see, interns are people who are looking to join your core business in the future and want to learn more about your business. Those repetitive dry tasks are new to them and understanding them would be a learning experience that they will enjoy for the time being. In exchange for doing a bit of dry work, they demand some mentorship from the staff of your company. Providing this mentorship helps them develop their understanding of the field and helps them advance their careers. In the long run, they might even apply for a job at your company which would mean they can give back to you in the form of the skills that they learned during their internship with you.

Interns are often willing to take up this mentorship and offer their services free of charge or at minimal wages. Their purpose is not to earn money, but to learn and get practical experience in the field. This means that you save costs and are able to check things off your list at the same time. However, there is one thing that you need to be careful of and that is that you establish a culture that forces your staff to understand the difference between an intern and an office boy. If interns are treated like office boys, they are going to get little out of their internship and are sure to form a negative image of the company.