Are you looking to hire an intern at your business? Whether you’re a large business, small business, Connecticut based business, or other, we want to provide our clients, customers, and friends with tips on how to hire interns that can benefit their business. While interns are looking for the right opportunity to advance in their career, we recognize that employers also need to find the right match in order to keep things running smoothly in the workplace. Additionally, we’ve been in your shoes before having hired multiple interns at our agency in the past. That being said, we’d like to go over our best tips on how to hire interns today, as well as how it can affect your commercial insurance.
How to Hire Interns through your Network
Think about this for a moment – when you need a new product or service and you’re not sure where to look, what is the first thing you do? Naturally, you ask friends or family who have experience with these goods so you can form your own, informed opinion on where to look. As a small business owner, you know this method is generally referred to as a “word of mouth referral,” which of course, are always great for your business. So, the first step that we usually take is asking our network. We’ll post to the Paradiso Insurance Facebook and Twitter pages to let people know that we are searching for a certain role, and see if anyone in our network has suggestions for potential interns. Usually we get a quite a few resumes that we can filter through from our network, which immensely helps us hire interns.
Search Locally
Yes, the next step we take is to look locally within our community. Of course, if our public posts or asking around within our existing contacts didn’t work out, then it’s time to branch out further. We tend to ask local colleges that have programs in place that focus on skill sets that are appealing to our agency. Generally, we’ll push out an email or phone call to the college of our choice, and simply ask if any of their students are in need of an internship. Generally speaking, the college interns we’ve hired in the past have come with a handful of useful skills. We’ve even employed some of our college interns with full time opportunities here at the agency, and they are still with us to this day and have become valuable members of our team.
How to Hire Interns Online
If word of mouth referrals and searching within your local community didn’t work out, it’s time to take to the internet. Like in any search process, the internet can be an extremely helpful tool when you’re looking for options on how to hire interns. We’ve found that if you check out Internship.com, you can set up an account, post an internship, then collect resumes directly to your email. After that, it’s a simple process of reviewing the applications to see which may be the best fit for your small business. Additionally, you can try checking out websites like Career Builder, Indeed, or Monster where resumes are posted publicly. If you find the right application for someone looking for an internship on one of these sites, you could have your next hire with a simple phone call to reach out to them.
How Hiring an Intern can Impact your Insurance
As a business owner, you’ve got a special eye on the bottom line of your business, and that’s something we understand first hand. Of course, there are a wide variety of factors that can affect the bottom line of your business, including your protection/coverage – your insurance. For that reason, as your trusted providers in everything insurance, we want to help you understand how hiring an intern can affect your insurance, so you can stay prepared.
Generally speaking, when you hire an intern, you will experience a slight increase in your premium, since you’re increasing payroll with your interns (since you cannot hire interns for free anymore). Although, this happens for any hire that you make in your company, so it shouldn’t be too alarming. Additionally, hiring an intern can increase your liability hazard on the job, depending on the intern’s experience and/or responsibilities. For instance, if an intern is asked to run a few errands for the boss, and they are driving on the road, there are various coverages you’d have to be concerned with in case they were to get into an accident. Although, it’s hard to say how much liability hiring an intern can put you at risk for, so if you have any specific concerns, be sure to ask our insurance agents any and all questions you may have regarding the subject.
Remember, if you ever have questions on your commercial insurance policy, our professional insurance agents are here to help. Whether you’d like a quote for a new policy, want to review details on your existing policy, or you have any questions for us, give us a call today. We promise to make the process both easy and understandable, and enjoyable along the way!
