Setting Up Your Intern for Success

 A new Marketing intern is starting this week. She will focus on b2b social media, our online marketing strategy and driving website traffic through online video. We are so excited to have her join the team and can’t wait for her to start. In order to best set her up for success, we know that a good onboarding process is key to her understanding her role and responsibilities as well as our expectations. It is too easy to “play it by ear” or “see how it goes” when an intern starts, so in order to have a positive experience both for your company and for your intern, you must take certain steps to prepare.

An Introduction

It is beneficial to plan short introductory sessions for your interns. Go over your company at a high level, review the staff with whom they will be in contact and let them know of any policies that are unique to your company. While your interns may have had previous experience in the workplace, they can’t be expected to know the policies unique to your environment. Discuss dress code, work hours and any company-wide expectations they are expected to meet. Also, be sure to tour the facilities–this will help your new team member feel more at home and at ease in their new environment.

An Overview of the Role

While you may have already discussed the role in the interview process or the job description, it is essential to review the activities your intern will be responsible for on day one. Set expectations for performance levels and be transparent about how performance is evaluated. For example, if you ask your intern to assist with social media, set a number of updates you would like to see per day–but beyond that, be clear about how much internal vs. external content you would like to share in your network. We found that creating checklists for job functions are not only very helpful when onboarding new team members, but are also exceptionally helpful in preventing errors.

Training

Some job functions will require training on specific software or programs. Provide this training sooner rather than later or you will find your workload increasing as you take on functions that should be done by your intern! The last thing you want to do is to create additional work for yourself because you didn’t take the time out upfront to provide the proper training.

Be Sure You are Aligned

Once you review your expectations, ask about their thoughts concerning what they hope to accomplish by the end of the internship. Work together to mutually achieve those goals. Ultimately this experience should be mutually beneficial–start that on day one!

Our intern, Lauren, will be blogging weekly about her experiences starting next week. We hope you find this content informative and helpful in your future endeavors in the world of marketing interns! We are excited for the impact she will make to our content marketing strategy!