According to data from the Collegiate Employment Research Institute, about 57,000 college students start an internship every year. If you want your promo products company to attract the strongest of these candidates and make the experience a success for everyone involved, you need to design a blueprint for success. Here are five smart strategies to use.

1. Outline Your Needs
Before you even start looking for an intern, you need to make sure you know exactly why you want one. If it’s for grunt work no one else wants to do, an intern won’t be the right person for you. The relationship needs to be symbiotic, where both sides are gaining valuable knowledge – interns can learn about the industry and you can evaluate them as a potential hire.

“Start by putting yourself in the shoes of the intern,” says Fletcher Wimbush, CEO of consultancy Hire Talent. “What do they want out of the experience? In the promotional products industry, these are likely kids that are thinking about entrepreneurship or careers in marketing or sales. They’re going to be looking for experiences to help them develop their resume and skills in all of those areas, and ideally, they should be left with measurable outcomes.”

Once you have a good idea of what an intern would like to accomplish, start putting together a detailed outline of what the job will entail. Gary Biron, VP of marketing at Top 40 distributor Geiger (asi/202900), works with his HR department to make sure the job description is tailored to his firm’s needs.

“Our HR department does a really great job at sending out information in advance, reminding people that if you’re going to be looking for an intern, there’s certain criteria you should be considering,” he says. “They work with us to help refine what we’re looking for.”

At Geiger, all intern searches begin with a well-defined task so the team can ask the right questions about a student’s schoolwork or major during the interview process. It helps the expected intern understand the exact scope of what they’ll be required to do, too.

Marshall Atkinson, a business coach and consultant to the promo products industry, suggests taking it even further than that. During the recruitment process, he believes firms should make clear every expectation, including what time interns are expected to show up, when they’re leaving and exactly what they’ll be working on throughout the day. Structure is key.

“Plan it out before you call anybody to get an intern,” he says. “Don’t just say ‘hey, we need some cheap labor, we should get an intern.’ That might be true, but it really does a disservice to the person coming in. Decide why you need them and what the experience will be so you’re not thinking, ‘I’m just going to give them some stuff that doesn’t really matter,’ and after two weeks you run out of stuff to give them.”

“A good internship involves work from both the intern and the manager.”— Michele McCauley, Apex Systems

You’ll also want to determine the outcomes of the internship for the company. Based on your needs, do you want a senior or a freshman? Will the internship repeat every semester? Is it a one-and-done thing, or does your company hope to hire that person at the end of the internship? It’s better to be well prepared rather than hitting a point where you’re making things up as you go along.

“Be willing to invest time and energy,” says Michele McCauley, principal at Apex Systems staffing agency. “A good internship involves work from both the intern and the manager. An intern should walk away with information about the company, as well as the industry, and a general understanding of multiple roles and how they work together.”

2. Look in the Right Places
Once you figure out an internship program plan, you’ll want to start a targeted search. If your firm has an HR department, that should be the first stop you make. Generally, they’ll have the best connections with schools and they’re trained to vet potential interns. They can come back to you with a list of candidates that fill your requirements.

Of course, leveraging your HR team isn’t the only way to find an intern. Many promo owners will have to take the job of intern searching on themselves.

Andy Shuman, general manager at Rockland Embroidery, works with a nearby high school because there’s no college within a reasonable distance. In his case, the school’s guidance counselors lead the charge and present candidates from AP programs. Kevin Scharnek, president of distributor 14 West (asi/197092), starts his search with the university entrepreneur programs he speaks to. David Tate, president of distributor Signet (asi/326636), attends internship fairs at a local university.

Meanwhile, Amy Spychalla, the executive director of strategic operations support at Top 40 distributor American Solutions for Business (ASB; asi/120075), takes a different approach. “Our internships are often with family members of ASB employees,” she says. “This works well because the interns are located close to our home office and already know a lot about the company through osmosis.”

When you have a filtered candidate list, it’s time to start the interview process. It should be conducted exactly like you would when hiring a regular employee. You’ll want to ask questions about work experience, gauge their aptitude for the intern position, find out why they want the job and if they have any background in the field, and determine if they’ll fit in well with the rest of the team.

“With interns, we look for the same qualities we want in full-time employees and also for savvy they can bring to the table in technology and connectedness,” Tate says. “Hire interns in areas where they’re most likely to contribute, like social media. Let them bring in fresh ideas. Adopt an attitude that they’ll contribute, set the stage for it, vet them as you would an employee, and you’ll be pleased.”

Hiring experts and promo products execs agree there are a number of specific qualities to look out for when hiring an intern: someone who’s engaged, flexible, open to learning, self-driven, outgoing and professional in appearance.

3. Communicate a Plan
By this stage, you’ve picked out your intern, hired them on and now it’s their first day at the office. What are they going to do? You’ve got to be SMART about it – create goals that are Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.

“You need to set realistic expectations and communicate that to the intern,” Biron says. “Otherwise, if it’s too overwhelming, you’re never going to achieve what you need to. But if you narrow your focus and are about expectations, it’s easy for everyone to meet those goals.”

That also means getting those focused tasks into some sort of tracking tool, like an Excel spreadsheet. Break it out by week and have routine meetings to go over the spreadsheet, goals and progress toward achieving them.

“Our internships are often with family members of ASB employees.”— Amy Spychalla, American Solutions for Business

Shuman agrees regular meetings and feedback are vital to the success of an internship, especially since he works with younger students.

“There’s nothing saying a 17- or 18-year-old won’t dive into the real-world experience and say, ‘this sucks,’ so you may as well address that a month in as opposed to six months in,” he says.

Scharnek, Atkinson, Spychalla and McCauley all stress that active participation and involvement is the key to a good experience. A good way to accomplish this is to have your intern rotate to different departments. Let them get a feel for the industry by trying out each area of the business. When they switch to a new specialty, make sure you’ve outlined who they’ll report to, what their role will be and what they should be learning. If the intern is there to work in a specific department the entire time, pair them up with a mentor – but be certain it’s someone who wants to do it.

“Make sure the person isn’t assigned to simply babysit the intern,” Atkinson says. “If this is just one more thing you’re adding to a person’s plate, that relationship is going to be seen as a chore more than something they really want to do. It’ll be a better experience both for the intern and the company when you have someone who really wants to do it instead of someone who’s volun-told.”

Don’t forget – you can learn a lot from your intern, just like they’ll learn from you. “Ask questions to understand their perspective,” McCauley says. “The world has changed a lot since many of us were in college.”

4. Don’t Hide From Discipline
An intern should be treated like any other employee, which means they should be subject to the same rules, experts say. Not every internship experience will be absolutely wonderful – you may end up with someone who slacks, doesn’t get involved (Scharnek once had an intern who sat around for hours before asking what to do), or even stays on their phone all the time.

“Sometimes students can be a little flaky because they haven’t really worked anywhere, so you get people who don’t really have soft business skills like punctuality, the desire to work the whole time, or to not be on their phone,” Atkinson says. Tate agrees, noting that often “immaturity is the biggest culprit of a less-than-stellar experience.”

In situations like that, Wimbush recommends using the communication meetings to follow up on any of these problems. You should have notes from every meeting showing how the intern is progressing with their goals, and if there’s an issue, your first move should be to ask where they need help.

“If the problem happens again week after week, then you can say, ‘Look, we’ve discussed this each week that you’re not making progress toward achieving your goal. I’ve made myself available to assist you, and we’re still not achieving it. Maybe it’s time we decide to part ways,’” Wimbush says.

The most important thing, he adds, is to follow a performance improvement plan where the weekly meetings measure progress toward solving a workplace issue. If you don’t run through that process and instead let the intern go, you run a risk of retaliation. You want to meet with them enough so if a problem reaches its peak, it’ll be just as clear to them as it is to you.

“There are questions. There are errors. We just want them to have an open mind and be able to apply that.”— Andy Shuman, Rockland Embroidery

Shuman believes the frequent meetings are important for maintaining good overall habits as well. His interns work on the financial side at Rockland Embroidery.

“Because they’re doing our accounting, there’s pretty stringent oversight,” Shuman says. “If they make an error, that’s fine, but we’ve got to know about it. If they’re entering a payable, for instance, and they enter a $100 payable as $10,000, that’s a problem. There are a lot of checks and balances in place when you’re dealing with accounting, so we meet with them and the guidance counselor pretty regularly. Things go wrong. There are questions. There are errors. We just want them to have an open mind and be able to apply that.”

Really, it all boils down to communication and making sure everything you expect is clear. “We’ve had a few interns that required a little counseling, who didn’t understand the expectations at the workplace,” Biron says. “You have to spend a little more time telling them that here in the real world, this is what you’ve got to do.”

5. Send Home a Paycheck
This one isn’t really a preference – it’s become a given. Internships straddle a murky legal line of whether the person working should be paid or unpaid. The short answer? You should really pay your interns. The Fair Labor Standards Act has a seven-factor test to determine if an intern should be paid or not, but also notes that each instance is different. It’s easier, fairer and more legal to send interns home with a paycheck.

“The general rule of thumb is you’ve got to pay them if you’re giving them work that can otherwise be done by somebody else,” Wimbush says. “If you give them clerical work to do, like filing and printing and distributing, or if you give them sales calls to do or errands to run, that’s all work. You’ve got to pay them.”

But, he notes, if the tasks your intern is doing are more educational in nature – say they’re job-shadowing or observing with little assistance – then it’s not work that produces and technically doesn’t have to be paid. Still, many, like Atkinson, think that no matter what, interns should cash in.

“Paying an intern shows you value their time and it adds to the experience for them,” he says. “Whether it’s hourly or at the end of the internship, there’s always some sort of check.” Additionally, if the internship goes sour and the person you had working for you wasn’t paid – but thought they should’ve been – you could be in for a legal and reputational battle. That’s why ultimately it’s better to pay.

“We recognize with interns that their time is valuable, and we budget accordingly to have that kind of resource,” Biron says. “Part of our expectation is they do a task. Everyone that we’ve hired so far has accomplished things we would have to hire somebody to do anyway.”