Since founding enthuse.me last year, I have been thinking about how we can utilise the growing number of post-graduates looking for internships. Now that enthuse.me is ready to start accelerating its user growth from early adopters to regular users, I thought now would be a good time to start looking into recruitment of Interns. When I started the process, a few questions came to mind:
1. What can you expect from an intern?
2. Do you pay an intern?
3. How do you find them?
1. What can you expect? I can’t fully answer this yet, our first intern starts this week. Having seen the quality of applications, my expectations are high. With proper support and supervision, I am expecting our first intern to make a real contribution to the team.
2. Do you pay an intern? There are two sides to this, legal and moral. I personally am feel it’s wrong not to pay an intern if you are expecting them to make a contribution to the business. In any case, there are goverment guidlines about this - https://www.gov.uk/employment-rights-for-interns
3. How do you find them? I found two websites that were low cost and they both attracted some quality interns. www.internwise.co.uk and www.enternships.com. Enternships had a neat feature that allowed you to ask the applications a filter question. As the role was in marketing, I asked all applicants to write a tweet to promote enthuse. The results were mixed and it was a good idea. I also asked all applicants whose CV I liked to write a blog post reviewing enthuse.me. This really seperated the wheat from the chaff and we were left with few candidates we wanted to interview.
Of course, it would have been even more useful if all the applicants created an enthuse.me profile for us to review!
FYI - here are the two adverts:
http://www.internwise.co.uk/events/details/4620-PR-Marketing-SEO-Intern/
&
https://www.enternships.com/en/enternships/6540-pr-marketing-executive-enthuse-me
