Bedside Manner Needed To Nurture Interns Along

By Ian Lipner

It's easy to tell when the summer's almost over. It gets dark earlier. Pennant races heat up. A bit closer to home, clients and executives come back from their vacations armed with to-do lists. The cost of spiral notebooks goes through the roof. And your intern's chair is empty.

While classes are out during the summer, intern candidates are plentiful, especially in the larger media markets.

However, managing interns during the school year can be more of a scheduling challenge, and many students choose to prioritize school over acquiring work experience.

So, how do you make sure you have a team of productive interns all year long?

Move on it now. If you don't have a fall intern lined up, start right now. The students are either just moving back to school or they're sobering, er, gearing up for their first week of classes. Find your area's university job boards. Send an e-mail to the colleges' career-development offices. Use your local Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) or International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) chapter Web sites. And at least log on to Craigslist.org and post a job for free locally. Go. Now!

From now on, plan ahead. Job One is to make sure that you have winter, spring, summer and fall internship programs.

First, mark your calendar for Nov. 15, when you'll do the above tasks again so students can think about their plans during Thanksgiving; don't wait until they're mired in finals. Also, mark the calendar for April 15 for the same reason. For summer internships, plan to spend more time evaluating the students.

While there will be many more candidates, the pool may not be as dense with the type of overachievers who choose to work during school. Save the best resumes for future semesters - especially if the candidates accepted summer spots at other firms. Many firms don't bother with interns while classes are in session, and you may be able to grab a great candidate for a spring internship who's already been trained.

Choose wisely. Once the resumes start coming in, devote some of your team's time to assessing the candidates. Conducting first rounds of intern interviews can be a good exercise for your full-time junior professionals, and they likely can relate better to the candidates.

Scrutinize attitudes and aptitudes more than majors. If you're hiring more than one intern, which often is necessary to fill even a single intern chair 40 hours a week, choose candidates with diverse skills.

Some students might be better at process, while others are out-of-the-box thinkers. The out-of-the-boxers usually are comfortable with working more independently, but they can bore easily. Regardless, if candidates can write -- snap them up.

Create a formalized program. Because interns are accustomed to a curriculum-based learning environment, they often do best in a program that follows a linear path. Try to lay out a specific plan for teaching essential skills while still serving your company's needs.

The program should start with the working-world basics; e.g., mail merges, Excel sorting, document scanning, etc. Emphasize the importance of speed and accuracy even in the "lowest" of tasks. Don't allow them to take all day to fax 10 documents. Empower a full-time junior professional to keep them moving.

By the time the program is complete, you'll meaningfully extend your team's capacity and simultaneously give a crop of future PR professionals the building blocks they need to accelerate their careers.

If you do it correctly, you will build a reputation as a good program among the local universities - and recruitment will become easier each cycle.

Contact: Ian Lipner is associate director in the Washington, D.C., office of Lewis PR and founder of YoungPRPros.com. He can be reached at 202.349.3866, ianl@lewispr.com.