Agencies & interns
It's that time?of year when I start to get questions from agency owners about summer interns.
As someone who got my start as an intern on Capitol Hill back in the early 1990s, I'm a strong advocate for students to seek out these opportunities.
Today, I'm just as passionate in telling small agency owners that it probably isn't a good idea for their own business.
Internships are a good thing, but generally work out better for mid- to large-size organizations.
Rather than being a source of cheap labor, they can easily become a management burden for a small team.
I'll discuss this more later in this week's newsletter, but first let's see what Jen has rounded up for us this week.
— Chip Griffin, SAGA Founder
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Below are some articles, blog posts, podcasts, and videos that we came across during the past week or so that provide useful perspective and information for PR and marketing agency owners. While we don’t necessarily endorse all of the views expressed in these links, we think they are worth your time.
— Jen Griffin, SAGA Community Manager
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Agencies & interns
Most small PR and marketing agencies struggle with the bandwidth to meet all of the needs of clients while also working on the business itself.
At the same time, recruiting remains difficult.
The logical solution seems to be hiring interns, but the reality is often far different than the vision.
A typical summer intern might be with your agency from mid-May to mid-August if you're lucky -- about 90 days.
Most will want to take some time off to see friends, visit family, or enjoy a bit of a summer break. So knock off a week or two.
Now you're looking at about 75 calendar days -- or a little more than 50 workdays.
Of course, like any new worker, these interns need to be onboarded. If you do a great job and limit their responsibilities, you might get that done in a week.?
Their last week will be spent tying up loose ends and handing things over to other members of the team.?
Now you're down to -- at most -- 40 productive workdays.
And the level of productivity will be less than your most junior team member since these are students without much real-world work experience and no knowledge of your agency's way of doing things.
This also means more oversight and handholding from whoever is managing the intern (and hopefully that's not you as the owner).
But let's say you have a top-notch intern who exceeds all your expectations. You only have 40 productive workdays but you're thrilled with what they have done in that time.
Now what do you do when they leave in August? Your team just got a real boost from having some additional help coupled with it being a traditionally slower time for most agencies.
Your agency heads into September without that intern as an asset and with clients clamoring for more work to hit the Labor Day to Thanksgiving sprint hard.
A larger organization with several layers of management and the ability to bring on a group of interns to spread out the overhead doesn't feel a lot of the pain this can induce. And, for them, the longer-term recruitment benefits might pay off since they typically do a lot more entry-level hiring than small agencies.
And I have only focused on the problems with interns in small agencies from the business perspective. What about the interns themselves??
Internships should be learning experiences and that means taking time away from productivity to teach and mentor. Either you invest more time to meet that goal or the intern ends up just being a glorified administrative helper with a notch on their resume without much else.
If you have the bandwidth and ability to make an internship a rewarding experience, then by all means do it.
But if you are looking for a way to acquire additional labor hours at low cost, hiring an intern isn't the way to go.