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14 Reasons Your Small Business Should Be Hiring Interns

Interns can be a powerful tool for your business if you utilise them correctly. We reached out to industry experts to find out all the advantages of hiring interns for your small business.

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#1 Latest techniques, tools and ideas

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As a small business focused on data analytics, we love hiring interns, primarily because of the fresh ideas and strategies they bring. Our industry is in the midst of rapid disruption, and bringing in young people who are in the midst of college or just graduated helps us all learn the newest techniques, tools and ideas that our clients will ask us about in the near future. We also love giving these soon-to-be or new grads a chance to get experience and learn job skills before they go into a largerbusiness where they may not get as much one-on-one attention and coaching.

Contributors: Sam Underwood from Futurety

#2 Interns Are Ready and Willing to be Taught

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Perhaps one of the advantages of hiring interns is the fact that they are very teachable. It is because it is easier to teach someone with no skills to do a job properly than somebody who already has experience because it is hard to break the bad habits they already have. Interns are eager to learn practical work experience so they are very competent and results-driven.

When you give them specific instructions, they’ll most likely follow them to complete their tasks successfully. And since they belong in the younger generation, they are much more progressive and open to new ideas. They can bring new perspective. Young minds can teach the older ones so it is also important to make their opinions known and heard.

Contributors: Sittikorn Nualrod from System Stone Co. Ltd.

#3 Ongoing learning experience

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Most of our office interns are studying to become graphic artists and they bring lots of creativity and ideas to the table, which benefits us and our customers. The new techniques and styles they learn at school are shared with our employees during their internships. This also creates an ongoing learning experience for our permanent staff. Hands-down the greatest benefit our company receives from hiring interns is their desire to become permanent employees after graduation. In the last three years, 75 percent of our interns became full-time permanent employees. We couldn't be happier!

Contributors: Shelley Grieshop from Totally Promotional

#4 Fresh perspective and new ideas

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We are commercial printers, an aging industry in more ways then one. Our employee’s are older, and set in there ways. An enthusiastic young intern brings a fresh perspective and new ideas. They also light a fire under some of our more complacent employees.An intern returning to school will often talk positively about us to other students, filling the queue for future interns.

Contributors: Bob Dixon from L+L Printers

#5 Hiring Interns is Win-Win – they get experience, you get time

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In my roles as an owner of a digital marketing agency and on the board of a non-profit, we love interns because everybody wins. They need experience and are hungry to learn. We have more work than we can feasibly accomplish alone. At our non-profit, we don't have the budget for an employee, but we can use interns to handle tasks like social media posting, sending emails, conducting research, doing basic marketing design tasks, and things like that.

That frees up the assistant and executive director to focus on their jobs. At my agency, we instruct, provide readings, and then allow our interns to do actual work. They manage research, client document management, write blog content, and social media posts. The win-win applies because they then have items for their portfolio, experience at an agency, and have a greater understanding of what we do. The win for us is that we have work being done, with lengthy or lower-level tasks being handled by the interns instead of senior-level employees.

Contributors: Courtney Herda from Smarter Searches

#6 Expand Capacity & Mix Things Up

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As long as your organization has the capacity to take on the training and mentorship of interns, the experience is 100% worth it for all parties involved. Interns help expand your capacity in both obvious and non-obvious ways. For one, you simply have more hands on deck to expand the capacity of what the team can get done. In addition, and just as important - you get a fresh perspective, thought-provoking questions and a new team dynamic!

Contributors: Devon Barnhard from Cloverleaf

#7 The Hidden Benefits of Interns

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I’ve started utilizing interns this year, and it's been a great experience that I recommend to a lot of peers. I help nonprofits and social enterprises with their marketing and communications, and also teach small businesses how to incorporate philanthropy. So, because I generally work with smaller organizations who have little marketing experience or knowledge, it’s terrific to have interns because they share a lot of similarities with my customer base.

Often the things I’m teaching my interns are relevant to my clients, and vice versa. Additionally, having interns helps me speak, and explain things, more clearly, which means I’m refining my own message and marketing without the use of jargon. And, for this reason, I also have them read through my website to make sure they understand and can repeat what it says.

All of these factors and more simply means that the things I’m doing to make improvements inside my company are also benefiting clients outside of my company. Everyone wins! And, of course, there is the obvious benefit of having more hands to help complete the work!

Contributors: Kristi Porter from Signify

#9 Learning to be a boss

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When my sister and I first started our business, Impish Lee, we had no experience or understanding of how to be a boss. We’d never done it before. We ran an internship program our first summer after launching and really had to learn how to be good bosses. Although we wanted our interns to have fun and learn new things, we also needed them to be productive and work hard. That summer was crucial for us to discovery the fine line between good friend and good boss. We learned that there are certain boundaries between employers and employees. Having interns helped us practice these skills before diving straight into hiring employees.

Contributors: Kali Ventresca from Impish Lee

#10 Boosted Productivity

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With more hands on deck it’s much easier to divide and conquer, especially when it comes to more menial tasks. Interns are often eager to show their worth, skill, and knowledge, so their help can be invaluable for reducing the strain on the rest of your team who may already be swamped with side-projects and more involved tasks.

Contributors: Jim Milan from Auto Accessories Garage

#11 Frees my time up to focus on the business

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As much as I'd love to engage in the activities that I find fun and enjoyable, like producing content and marketing, as CEO of a 3D animation & creative content studio startup I have to focus on operations, management, business development, sales, accounting, legal, cultivating creative content partnerships, getting paid and paying vendors. My interns have taken the helm of all content production, writing and marketing while I oversee and guide their efforts.

Contributors: Lizbeth from Tiny Milkshake Media

#12 Helps to stay up-to-date on social media and trends

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I know social media well but having Generation Z and Millennials on the younger spectrum (age 22 and 23 y years old) have helped me to keep up with the latest social media and pop culture trends like Cardi B using the expression Okrrrrrr. It helps us create and produce relevant content for Instagram where we post most of our 3D animations and content; a platform that skews younger.

Contributors: Lizbeth from Tiny Milkshake Media

#13 Test Drive

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Employing interns provides a pool of hirable candidates that have already been vetted and test-driven. You eliminate the risks associated with hiring someone who has oversold themselves in their resume and interview, only to show up and not be able to deliver. Additionally, you'll know if they fit your culture and can work well with your processes and other team members.

Contributors: Tammy Duggan-Herd from Campaign Creators

#14 True Mastery

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If you really want to master a subject or skill - try to teach it to another person. Having interns provides endless opportunities to teach and explain what you do and how the intern can aid in the process. This exercise often illuminates gaps in your own understanding that you may not have realized and/or forces you to evaluate why you do the things the way you do. Ultimately, this process makes you a better practitioner of your craft in the end.

Contributors: Tammy Duggan-Herd from Campaign Creators

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Written by Zak Parker

Journalist, writer, musician, professional procrastinator. I'll add more here later.

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