HR leaders face many challenges in creating a positive employee experience and establishing a strong organisational culture. When it comes to internship programs, there’s an additional layer of difficulty as the projects need to be accomplished in an exceptionally short amount of time.
Here are three steps to make intern onboarding successful when you’re short of time:
1.Pre-boarding
Build up a relationship with your intern. It’s a valuable way to engage them as a high-potential, full-time candidate and to ensure they are learning about the company as much as they can before the first day.
Pre-boarding is just for the intern, but also for yourself: make sure to have prepared the goals and plan for your intern so they have a clear set of objectives to achieve in a reasonable amount of time.
2.Orientation
On their first day, make a great first impression as a company and give them a warm welcome. Make sure they get to meet everyone and get a tour of the office.
Familiarise them with your mission, vision and values, and introduce them to your services or products from a consumer perspective. Prepare a training or orientation session of your products or services.
3.Productivity
In order for the intern to get the most out of their internship, a particular leadership style is needed where clarity is key. Given that they have relatively little experience, interns have a lot to learn from simply witnessing operations of the company. It can be very overwhelming to be thrown into a new organisation, so be clear in what you need from them, explain why a task is done in a certain way, what the company has learned through a process and how to provide feedback.
Here’s to successful internships!
PS: here’s how we can help with your onboarding and induction