Searching for the right intern for your business? Whether you’re a large business, small business, Connecticut based business, or located elsewhere, we want to provide our clients, customers, and friends with the right tips on how to best hire interns that can benefit their business. While all 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 within the workplace. Additionally, we’ve been in your shoes, having hired multiple interns at our agency over the years. That being said, we’d like to go over our best advice on how to locate and hire interns today, and 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 what you are looking to purchase, so that you find the best option for you. As a small business owner, you know this method is generally referred to as a “word of mouth” referral. These tend to be the most valuable referrals in any situation, which is why we always recommend the first step in any intern search is to ask within your professional network. We always start with a post to the Paradiso Insurance Facebook and Twitter pages to make the public aware that we are searching for an intern, and to see if anyone in our network has suggestions for potential candidates. Usually we receive quite a few resumes just from asking our colleagues.
Search Locally
Of course, if our public posts or asking around to our existing contacts doesn’t provide us with the right candidates, then we know it’s time to branch out further. Our next step is to ask local colleges with internship programs 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 been incredible assets to our team and some have even chosen to remain with us after graduation.
How to Hire Interns Online
If word of mouth referrals and searching within your local community doesn’t seem to be working then 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 just a simple phone call
How Hiring an Intern can Impact your Insurance
As a business owner, you care about 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 this, including your current insurance protection/coverage. For that reason, as your trusted insurance agency, we want to help you understand how hiring an intern can affect your policy so you can be prepared.
Generally speaking, when hiring an intern, you may experience a slight increase in your premium, since you’re increasing payroll by adding a new member to the team. 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 agency, and they are asked to drive somewhere, there are various coverages you want to make sure you have in case they were to get into an accident. Although, it can be 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