Who Has Time For Interns?

Over the past few months, I've been keeping an eye out for job opportunities for a few young friends of mine. When I look at what crosses my desk, however, I'm amazed at how many "jobs" turn out to be unpaid internships.
It seems that people believe by calling something an "internship" you can get around US minimum wage laws. This is not actually true. There are a lot fewer exceptions to minimum wage laws than employers who should know better claim. The circumstances in which one can legally have an unpaid intern doing work in your office are quite narrow. But young people are often eager to get a foot in the door and strapped companies get excited about free labor, and so the internship market is one of the few actual pockets of laissez faire economics in this country.

But here's the thing about money. It is an amazingly efficient way to assign a value to something, and to get everyone to take it seriously. So when you don't pay with money in a transaction, you tend to pay with something else: time. The problem for an employer with unpaid interns is that they tend to soak up a lot of time.

I was reminded of this while reading a blog post over at Harvard Business Review from Jodi Glickman (author of Great on the Job) on how nobody has time for interns. She quoted a senior executive at Yelp as claiming an intern would be just one more thing to manage between work, travel, and kids. Which is often true. It takes time to train interns, and then (because no one can work for free forever) they move on. In theory, you should train them and then hire them, but this still involves an upfront investment of time and energy. Ideally, you want someone who can hit the ground running. But given that only a small proportion of young people can afford to work for free, or would want to, it seems unlikely that the top talent would go for such an arrangement.

And so, I have avoided the temptation to tap into the pool of free intern labor to narrow down my to-do list. The whole set-up will probably take more time than I'm going to save, unless I pay a decent wage. And if I'm going to pay a decent wage, why not hire a grown-up who I hope will stick around long term?

Does your organization pay interns? Does it hire them after their internships? Do you find your intern program to be worth the time?

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