School’s out. The promises of fun summer times are nearing. We can see it already: a vacation on the beach, massive music festivals, and visits to foreign places.
You’ll finally have some time to explore your bucket list a bit. Yet, chances are that you’re pretty stressed out as your college career comes to a close. The scramble to apply for and get into a good internship is very competitive.
Internship applications
There’s a feverish trend of internship applications among college juniors and seniors. But what do you think about the people who have to review all these applications? How many times to reviewers have to read the same clichés and credentials over and over again for hours at a time? It seems that both companies and applicants suffer in this hiring process.
If you think about it, the internship program is beneficial in the long run for both parties. Your business gets to get a taste of an intern’s performance and the intern gets some work experience. It’s a win-win situation in the bigger picture. The problem becomes how to find that ideal intern during the summer.
Here, we’ll go over some important pointers towards head hunting for the best summer interns.
Know What Open Positions Your Company Possesses
This should be a no-brainer for any company with a basic organizational structure. An internship program requires some basic degree of financial and legal planning. The basics of the offerings must be solid. Your company should understand the missing role before identifying the appropriate intern.
The main idea here is that your company can’t slack on the essentials. Put another way, your organization needs to have a solid approach to hiring. For example, calling a meeting among team members to discuss missing positions is a good idea. The best starting point begins with identifying administrative gaps.
Attend Relevant Career Fairs
If you’re a trading or investment banking company you’re not going to be recruiting English majors. Instead, you’ll be looking for accomplished math and finance students. Sounds easy, right? In this case, grabbing the ideal intern involves their fit, knowledge, and passion in the job.
Examples
Let’s use a basic example, pretend you’re a college recruiter for the chemistry industry. You’re attending a career fair to touch base with some chemical engineering juniors. After introductions, you begin your company's pitch. You’ll want to do things that make an impression on your potential interns. Things like charts, flyers, and even snacks are incredibly helpful in leaving a lasting impression.
Use the Internet
The Internet is the biggest unifying communications tool. So you should be using it to your advantage as much as possible. Popular social media platforms have made finding the right people very easy. LinkedIn represents one such platform. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn’s usage centers around professional connections. It’s like a publicly viewable online résumé that potential employers can browse.
Where
Usually, people use LinkedIn as a personal service to find potential employers. We’re going to be doing the opposite. By creating an corporate LinkedIn profile, it will be possible for your business to connect to potential interns looking for summer work.
LinkedIn will also save you a decent amount of time. You won’t need to go around asking about the credentials of other people. It’s an incredibly convenient process. Everything about a person’s professional qualifications and experience will appear in the open to other users.
Another useful feature of LinkedIn is the way that it processes connections. You’ve likely heard of the idea that any two people are related within six degrees of separation. The idea behind the connecting services that LinkedIn offers are similar. Even if you don’t know any famous or well-connected people, chances that somewhere along the line one of the friends of your friends do.
Reach Out Locally
It’s never a bad idea to take a look at what’s in front of you. There are tons of local students looking for some sort of work experience. The relevance of local talent that fits your business should not be overlooked at all. As an added benefit, local interns don’t have to deal with the troubles of commuting or renting.
Write out some newspaper or calendar ads. Talk with some of your groups of friends and see if they know anyone. Maybe even make some arrangements with the county colleges in the area. There is overwhelming potential around you no matter where you look.