A Guide to Internship Recruitment

What is an internship?

An internship is a 1 week to 12 month work placement within a business. Internships can be unpaid or paid, are available across a variety of industries and act as a great way for graduates to gain experience and also bring fresh, passionate individuals into an organisation. Here’s how to create an internship recruitment programme or streamline your existing one. 


The Internship Recruitment Process


Recruiting the right intern can have valuable long-term benefits for your organisation. An internship is all about personal development and as such it’s useful for businesses to treat the recruitment of interns similar to that of employees.

Take the time to think about the role your intern will fill within the business and try to ensure that your advert contains the following:

To source your intern, place a well thought out advert on recruitment sites, with specialist graduate recruiters, on your own website and social media. By openly advertising a placement you’ll automatically widen your available talent pool and increase the chances of finding someone enthusiastic and passionate about your role and industry.

How to interview interns


Once you’ve received a number of applications for your internship, you’ll need to think about interviews, but how should intern interviews be conducted?

The interviewing of interns should be conducted in the same way as it would for employees.  However when interviewing potential interns do give extra consideration to your interview questions, many interns will have limited industry experience so it’s therefore much better to ask questions relating to employable skills.

Questions you might wish to consider asking include:

In addition to these questions an interview is a good opportunity to find out how an intern might approach a particular project that they’ll be working on. By asking questions relating to a specific you can learn a lot about how an individual might approach a future problem.

Paying your interns


Do I need to pay my intern?

Yes. If your intern is classed as a worker then they will be due the national minimum wage as applicable to their age group. In order to be classed as a ‘worker’ interns must have:

It’s also worthwhile noting that whilst you may not have to pay your intern, interns earning a wage offer higher levels of loyalty and commitment to their employer and are often also more productive.

National minimum wage does not apply when:

Once you’ve decided to offer an internship placement to a candidate and they have accepted the position be sure to add your intern to your payroll system, so that your interns can receive their payment and any expenses each month.

If you want to hire interns or indeed if you would just like some advice, then please contact us to discuss your requirements.