Internships and co-op programs

One approach to gaining access to young, intelligent, and pre-screened talent is to work with select undergraduate and graduate-level universities to hire undergraduate and graduate-level students on internships and co-op programs. This approach enables the students to work on varied and challenging real-world problems and situations, and you and your team have an opportunity to "interview" these prospective employees over multiple months.

An important aspect of this approach is to assign the interns and co-op participants work that is important to the business and that has the possibility to change the way business is executed. Giving the students "busy" work is a waste of everyone's time and energy. You must be ready for you and your team members to mentor and manage the young team members. You must also be ready for projects to fail, but to learn from those failures, and you must be ready for projects to succeed and that those successes will demand and require that company to change to take advantage of new innovations, insights, and processes.

An important consideration is that younger staff members will have less experience in certain areas such as written and verbal communication skills and stakeholder management. If your efforts to drive innovation are to reap the maximum benefit, you will be putting these young, untested interns in collaboration with subject matter experts and business sponsors in functional areas of the company. The combination of the intern's technical expertise and enthusiasm coupled with the deep functional knowledge of the subject matter experts is a potent and desirable combination that can, and will, lead to breakthrough developments, but you will need to teach the young staff members how to interface with the more senior functional staff members in a manner that is appropriate for the project and overall business environment.

Over the years, I have provided detailed feedback to all the universities that I collaborate with, and have collaborated with, that their students need more training and skills in communication, collaboration, and the softer skills needed in the workplace. The university curriculums are changing, but we will need to further these skills in our recent graduates. Be ready to mentor and manage young team members in order to minimize, and possibly avoid, gaffes and faux pas on their part.

Internships and co-ops are a great way to bring new talent into your organization. If you can initiate, develop, and scale this type of program, you can hire the majority of your new staff members through this program. I suggest that you make this type of hiring a priority. I have employed this approach successfully and recommend that you consider it as well.