How to hire interns for startup? (Do’s, Don’ts and Best Practices)

Hiring Interns is one of the cost-effective ways to reduce the burden on sr and expensive employees. It also helps the economy in producing quality talent and hire future employees.

But there are problems.

1. An intern on average works for 2-4 months in the company and goes away
2. This creates a lot of consistency issues
3. An intern requires quite a decent amount of skiing, company knowledge transfer, and project knowledge transfer that takes quite a good amount of time
4. An intern learns slowly and tends to pick up slowly
5. Poor performing interns should be removed, and it often takes training + KT + PKT to and project allocation to know if he will perform well
6. Interns often work slowly and delay the projects
7. They also often leave security bugs which often become major issues

Software Engineering Interns Best Practices 

1. Hire a few but long-lasting (4 months on the project, at least)
2. Skilling before onboarding
3. Knowledge transfer before onboarding
4. Avoid calls, share SOPs, give time to the story, and do meet, back and forth questions to ensure that they have learned
5. Onboard only if you feel good
6. Onboard with a simple project to build RAPO and communication flow
7. See their commitment in terms of time, scrappiness, code quality, and if they are memorable

Important Points

1. In India, if you can pay at least 10K INR per month,  you have a higher chance of getting good-quality interns.
2. Don’t get FOMOed by FAANG interns sharing videos on youtube. Those positions are rare, and the supply of students/experienced people looking for internships is way higher

Interns For Content and Business Research

Interns for content writing can be a great way to increase SEO authority with guest posts. If you find a very good one, you can allocate them to the company blog as well and let them share their thought.

Before you hire a content writer intern, make sure to have a clear plan for the campaign, content, and goal of content to work on. This will allow you to plan the hiring properly and evaluate the right candidate for the project.

For example,

1. Guest Post Writer: if you plan to hire a content writer for a guest post, you don’t need a very experienced writer but a fast writer.
2. Company Blog Writer: When you are planning to hire a company blog writer, you would like the candidate to be skilled, knowledgable, and someone who understands the basics of marketing and ales.

I have seen significant meaningful contributions by candidates in this area. It takes time for research but interns often come up with some good key objectives.

Key Points:

1. Explain your expectations properly
2. Explain the input you will be giving
3. Explain the process they should take to write content, check plagiarism, revise, add images, do formatting
4. Explain to give credit/citation for the content/ideas they picked from the web
5. submit for approval and publish

Onboarding: 

1. Share a google drive folder with their name
2. Create a responsibility sheet with their name and details
3. Add project co-ordination if you don’t want to manage them directly
4. Everything on Google Sheets (No Notion, NO Jira, just Google Sheets)
5. Ask to report on Excel sheer and write a daily summary in Google sheet
6. Fileds in Google Sheets (Index, Daily Summary, Articles, creds)

Index: Have all the personal details to contact the intern and the project they are working on

Daily Summary: They write what they did on the day in bullet points

Articles: Title, Category, Deadline, Submission URL (Google Docks)

Creds: User credentials to draft the article

Why Google Sheets for this?

1. Everyone has in phone
2. Easy onboarding with Google
3. History of Edits available (Easy for HR to track the progress)
4. Easy to add access and remove at the time of onboarding or deboarding

Conclusion

Hiring Interns for Content(Blog, Social Media, Social Content, Small Research, Guest Post, campaign, UGC Campaigns, Less Impact Marketing projects and Individual Tasks, Small Research Work, UI UX Research is fine if you can pre-plan everything in a system, and execute.

Software Engineering Interns are not a good choice for software engineering projects as students leave less than 4  months without completing the projects.

A project that may take 1-2 months for an experienced employee to complete is often not completed by interns despite giving 4 months and the project remains stagnant.