Another semester of college is wrapping up, and thousands of students will be beginning the summer job hunt. In all likelihood, you’ve already received a number of résumés from the more pro-active students out there.
photo credit: meyshanworld
You might wonder why you should hire a summer student. Why bother hiring someone who doesn’t have much experience, and for only a few months? After all, by the time they’ve gained the amount of experience you’d want in an employee, they’ll be leaving your employ and heading back to school.
While it’s true that many, if not most, college students have very limited job experience, that’s not a reason to avoid hiring them. In fact, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, the lack of experience can actually be a good reason to hire a college student for the summer.
Besides, companies of all sizes have been hiring students as summer help for decades. Clearly, these young employees bring some benefit to an organization.
Increase Your Productivity
The most obvious reason to hire a college student (or several) for the summer is the increased productivity that will result from having an extra set of hands on the job. Many of the low priority projects—the ones that you’ve been putting off for the past 6 months—can be assigned to a summer student.
Instead of letting these projects sit on the back burner for another 6 months, you can get them done over the summer, without having to take time away from the more important tasks that you need to focus on. Not only that, but you may find that these seemingly unimportant projects will greatly improve your organization’s success once they’re accomplished.
The benefit of having an extra set of hands around the office is especially obvious during the summer. Many of your permanent employees will be away on vacation during these months, and having someone around to pick up the slack is beneficial in both obvious and subtle ways.
Having a summer temp around to cover for an employee who’s on vacation obviously makes things easier for those employees who aren’t on vacation. With the temp around to pick up the slack, none of them will have to try and do their own work as well as the work of their vacationing co-worker.
But a summer student will also help the employee who is on vacation. If they can come back to an empty inbox, they’ll be able to turn their freshly recharged energies toward the most current projects, instead of getting burned out trying to catch up on the backlog that developed while they were gone.
Re-Invigorate Your Organization
Among the less obvious benefits of hiring a college student for the summer is the vitality and youthful energy that they can bring to your company. This is where the seemingly counter-intuitive statement about inexperience being an asset comes in.
When you hire a permanent employee, you’ll generally consider experience to be an asset. The same can be true when hiring a temporary employee.
That said, one of the great things about hiring a college student is that, in spite of their inexperience, odds are good that they want to work in your industry when the graduate. This desire will often show up in the form of passion and excitement for the job.
This is where a lack of experience can become advantageous. Because they haven’t spent years in the industry learning the “right way” to do things, fresh-faced college students may surprise you with new ways of thinking about the problems that your organization deals with every day.
Sometimes, the idea will seem so obvious that you’ll wonder why you didn’t come up with it on your own. That’s one of the advantages of hiring someone who can see your organization with new eyes.
Make Your Expectations Clear
While inexperience can prove to be an asset in a summer hire, it doesn’t come without its drawbacks. Many college students may have no prior experience working in an office environment. Because of this, things that are second nature to you—such as when to take a break and when to get back to work—may not be as apparent to them.
If you make your expectations clear early on, these little hiccups can usually be avoided. The best way to do this is to put your expectations in writing. This should be done with either an employment offer letter before you officially hire the candidate, or in the employee contract that he or she will sign at the time of hiring.
As long as you make him or her aware of your expectations, employing a college student for the summer can be a great boost to your organization. With the benefits of increased productivity and fresh insight into familiar problems, you may find yourself wondering why you didn’t hire summer students years ago.
Best of all, if you treat them right and train them to do things your way, you might find a few shining stars who will want to come and work for you when they graduate.
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