Come summertime, most businesses start thinking in terms of hiring interns. It's never too early to think of how you can best use their time for your business and also facilitate their growth. Create a successful internship program in advance to help you reap great mutual benefits.

1. Start With A Plan

Start with the basic internship program plan. You need to include aspects such as internship duration, stipend rates, number of interns to hire, preferred college majors and skills sets and so on. Also determine the kinds of projects you want to assign to the new interns.

2. Evaluate Office Space And Amenities

Where will your interns sit and work? Do you sufficient number of workstations for them, or desks? Evaluate just how many interns you can successfully house given your present infrastructure.

3. Create Lists Of Everything You Need

Make a list of all everything you need to put in place in order to hire and deploy interns. Items such as additional desks, laptops, desktops, more lights, chairs, permissions, access cards and so on should be part of your list.

4. Set Aside Some Real Assignments

Set aside some real assignments that they can realistic tackle, with minimum supervision. For example, go over all the small tasks and projects that have been put into the pending list due to lack of time. Set aside a few of these assignments for your interns to tackle.

5. Establish Clear Lines Of Authority

Young interns are not used to office discipline and lines of authority. Before you hire them, assign some of your employees as intern supervisors. Assign a supervisor should be in charge of a specific number of interns - take care to see that no supervisor has to handle more interns than possible.

6. Define Duties Intelligently

Keep your young interns engaged and energized via sharply defined duties. Assign specific projects with realistic timelines, keeping your intern's youth and lack of experience in mind. Don't load anyone too much - even if they seem to be able to handle it.

7. Plan Induction Training Sessions

It's important for the intern to get to know your company, its objectives, achievements, management, and operation scale and so on. Prepare a set of slides for this purpose. You can use your employee induction slides, just as long as everything's watered down for your young audience.

8. Establish A Good Review And Assessment Process

Set up a process for progress review at the end of every week. Intern supervisors must have a sit down with their interns to gauge personal impressions, comfort level and project progress. Also create weekly report templates that are easy to fill out.

9. Create Job Descriptions

Write a clear job description for your interns before you start hiring. Your JD should be self-explanatory; it should contain the list of duties that you expect the intern to perform, and your Service Level Agreement for each task. This way, you don't have to explain the duties to each intern; you'll also be able to weed out the negative ones.

10. Set Up An Interview Process

List out the questions you want to ask the interns. Assess their motivation levels, verbal skills, communication skills and attitude. Use these assessment processes to shortlist only those interns who will be suitable to your company's work environment.

11. Initiate A Reward Process

A reward process is very important in an internship program. When an intern completes a task ahead of time, or takes initiative, make sure you reward that intern via cash, coupons, discounted products, transport facilities, or even a company t-shirt. Your internship program will succeed better if you do this.

Gagan works with Tic Two, a leading provider of Job placement and internship opportunities in Shanghai and writes articles on how to make the most of one's internship.

Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Flickr