Exiting Interns - Designing Leaders

If you still have summer interns, you won’t for much longer. University classes are starting to kick off for the fall semester, and those students who have been getting the coffee and making copies (and hopefully, a lot more) for the last couple months are about to go out the door.

Any good internship program (and yes, there are plenty of bad ones out there) has some important objectives, including:

– Introducing the intern to working in the real world
– Getting something of business value from the intern
– Evaluating them for possible full-time employment
– Letting them evaluate you as a potential employer

Hopefully you have been doing things all along that help you meet these objectives, but don’t quit until they’re out the door (in fact, don’t even quit then). If you have had an intern working for you and you want to get the full value out of your internship program, make sure you finish strong. In particular, you should:

Have a plan for their projects If you have had your intern working on a project in addition to helping with day-to-day tasks, make sure you have a plan for getting the value out of it. If they are done, then be ready to make use of the results. If they aren’t finished — if the results take longer than a summer to become obvious — then ensure a full-time person is going to take it over. Make sure they see the end-to-end process so they understand that every bit of work needs to be adding something to the organization. In addition to getting the business value from their work, you also want them to see that you appreciate the contribution they made, no matter how small it may be; that will pay big dividends later if you try to recruit them when they graduate.

Facilitate a final round of discussions Your interns should be learning as much as they can about your organization, which means talking to people in different roles. Make sure they have met the people they should meet, and if there is anyone who wants to connect with them one more time, help set that up with your intern. If they missed out on any useful meetings, try to arrange that before they leave. One very important thing they can take away from this experience is the start of a professional network, so at a minimum encourage them to connect on LinkedIn with people in the company whom they should know.

Hold an exit interview Just as you would have an exit interview with an employee who’s quitting (you WOULD have an exit interview with an employee who’s quitting, right?), you should have one with your departing interns. Review their objectives from the start of the program and see if they were met, so you know if they got the training experience they expected and if you got the value from them that you expected. Get their impressions of the program so you can improve it next year and can highlight the positives the next time you advertise for interns. Showing them that you’re interested in their experience also boosts your employment brand, and the conversation gives you a chance to evaluate their suitability for the organization one more time.

Keep connected Stay engaged with interns after they leave. If you have an alumni program in your company, include them in it, especially if you are thinking you would like to hire them full-time when they graduate. Stay connected with them so you can reinforce your employment brand through newsletters, a Facebook page, alumni events, or whatever else you do to stay linked to former employees. If you’re thinking of hiring them back, it’s important to know how to get in touch with them!

Internships can be very valuable to companies, especially as both a screening method for recruiting and an advertisement for the organization’s culture. Getting the full benefit of your internship program requires some effort up until the end, but it’s worth it.