What do you do when you need more helping hands for your business without costing your tight budget? Some might think about hiring temp or part-time employees to ensure that everything runs smoothly. But have you ever thought about hiring interns?

Be it fresh grads or college students, hiring interns can be a good option that will benefit your organisation in numerous ways.  While they might not have much working experience, interns are typically known for their high enthusiasm and willingness to work hard.

Rather than expecting them to run errands and perform menial tasks such as the infamous coffee run and photocopy, leaders should see the internship program as a learning opportunity to develop great talent that can perhaps join the organisation as a full-time workforce. If you can keep them busy with meaningful tasks, internship can be a great way to discover future entrepreneurs.

Hiring interns is no different than hiring other employment types. Just like recruiting full-time workers, there are several factors you should take into account before bringing interns into the team.

While hiring interns can be beneficial for your business, it does come with its fair share of challenges to impact business workings and productivity levels during training periods for a brief timeframe. So, if you are considering to initiate an internship program, below are some pros and cons of welcoming interns on board:

See: 8 Tips to Turn Your Internship into a Full-Time Job

PROS

Extra pair of helping hands

Hiring interns is a great way to get additional helping hands to make up for the team’s talent shortage. Dedicated candidates always take internship opportunities seriously, as they want to achieve, learn and gain practical experience during internships that will contribute to add-on value in their resume and sketch future career pathways.

You need to leverage this spirit by delegating interns with real and impactful works. This not just helps ensure that your project runs smoothly, this strategy will help the interns learn how to put forth their theoretical knowledge into practice.

New and fresh perspectives

Young-spirited interns always bring innovative ideas and vibrant perspectives to the team workings. If your company is struggling with particular issues teamwork and collaboration issues, hiring interns could open mental walls and gain new perspectives about the topic on hand. By acquiring more insights and seeking new perspectives, you can make better decisions to impact the entire organisation.

Scout for great talents

The greatest advantage of hiring interns is that you will have the opportunity to discover and fetch top talents, even before they are available in the talent market. By tapping into this fresh talent pool, you can scout potential talents who demonstrate excellent cultural fit with the company values. During the internship program, you can assess candidate’s skills and loyalty towards their job, further which you can guide and train them to be your next permanent employees.

Digital savviness

Millennials and Gen Y are widely-known for their digital savviness. Social media, tablet, smartphone, and computer are must-haves for their everyday life. If you want to expand your business and start engaging young customers hiring interns could prove to be a cost-effective alternative for businesses to upscale growth.

CONS

Additional budget

Remember: no good labour is free. Unless the candidate wants to do internship to complete college credits, there are good chances that you have to prepare for additional budget to pay for internship stipends. While you might not spend thousands of dollar for hiring interns on the likes of Facebook or Snapchat, it still remains crucial to make sure that every penny you invest is worth it. To avoid wasting money, you should ensure that your interns possess the right skills and motivation to complete their tasks.

Time to interview

Just like other hiring, you will need to allocate some time to conduct interviews with candidates seeking internship with your organisation. Sometimes, this process can be very time-consuming as you have to juggle between your professional commitments and the time schedule for an interview.

Owing to which, before advertising about an internship program from your company, you have to check whether you have enough time to allocate for fetching and training fresh talent or not.

Commitment to train

To make sure that your enthusiastic interns do not end up slacking off at the office, you have to equip them with adequate knowledge and training about their jobs. The problem is, training interns will not only be time-consuming, but also energy-draining. Therefore, it takes consistent commitment and right resources to train new interns. If you think that you do not have the time and right resources to mentor and guide them to help assimilate with the new workplace culture, then probably hiring interns is not a wise decision for now.

No work ethics

While it is true that young people might have copious creative concepts on mind to execute, not all concepts and ideas offer feasibility of practical implementation. Some ideas turn out to be a fragment of individual’s fictitious imagination. Also owing to lack of work ethics, some of the ideas presented are too naïve to be explored, to contribute to an individual opinion and might end up focusing on self-interests instead of team development.

Read also: Indonesian Talents Prefer Working for Domestic Employers Over International Companies