The Virtual Summer Intern

Innovating How We Interview and Employ Summer Interns in The Current Crisis

Over the past two weeks, many schools and offices rapidly shifted to allowing, or requiring, students, teachers, and employees to study, teach, and work from home for the foreseeable future, to quell transmission of the coronavirus. Meanwhile, many employers are midway through the season for interviewing candidates for summer jobs.

Indeed, these are stressful and worrisome times on multiple fronts. Among myriad concerns, students who need summer jobs understandably are nervous about businesses canceling interviews. Employers might be anxious about how to manage summer internship programs if we all need to continue working remotely for a while.

Adopting a growth mindset, let’s seize this opportunity to improve our virtual communications skills and innovate the way we recruit, train, and optimize talent.

First, let’s innovate the way we interview summer interns. In doing so, candidates can showcase individual strengths that often are overlooked in traditional recruiting models. Further, we can identify candidates who will excel in virtual summer internships if current work-at-home circumstances persist.

Next, for companies that previously may never have considered remote summer internships, we can craft workable frameworks for online training, mentoring, assignment distribution, feedback, and team-building. We can identify tasks that interns, mentors, and administrative staff can do remotely, so that we can keep momentum going in this volatile business climate.

Let’s Establish or Update Helpful Protocols for Virtual Interviews

Employers who are midstream in their summer hiring season could shift candidate interviews online by:

• Engaging tech support to identify the best fit for an online communications platform
• Appointing a small interviewing team who will enhance their awareness of effective communications skills in video conferencing, and craft a protocol for conducting video interviews
• Communicating this contingency plan to candidates sooner rather than later, and reassuring them that the interviews will go forward.

Employers and interviewers can use this opportunity to assess what works and doesn’t work in online meetings, conference calls, and interviews.

How many of us have experienced a conference call or video chat in which the dial-in information doesn’t work; individuals are late or fail to join the call; participants fail to mute their phones and then eat, drink, or type near the microphone; background noise abounds, such as GPS instructions, computer alerts, construction noise, sirens, or dogs barking; there is no agenda; participants interrupt and speak over one another; and ultimately the call exceeds its allotted time? Let’s do better! Here are some tips for setting up an online interviewing protocol: LINK

Let’s Shift Away from Business-as-Usual Interview Styles and Get Creative

This current situation presents an invitation to step away from traditional interview dynamics and consider alternative ways to engage and assess candidates’ strengths. A commitment to innovation in interviewing will enhance diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and will help us scout candidates that can excel in work-at-home settings.

“Old-school” interviewing Q&A tends to favor extroverts and natural talkers, and doesn’t necessarily identify important workplace assets like thoughtful analysis, creative problem-solving, collaboration, writing, or editing. Traditional interviewing styles also limit employers’ ability to garner information about a candidate’s emotional intelligence.

Video interviewing conducted the same way as conventional in-person interviews will be even more problematic. Limitations on being able to read visual cues in online meetings will increase the frequency of interruptions and overlapping voices. Candidates’ ideas will get lost in cyberspace.

What can we do about this? We can be mindful and intentional about how we set up video interviews in the next few weeks and months. Interviewers (whether individuals or teams) should consider in advance how to pose questions in an organized fashion, to give candidates time to hear and respond to inquiries. We also should get creative and cultivate opportunities for applicants to highlight strengths that often go unnoticed in traditional interview models.

For example, employers could consider giving candidates prompts in advance of an online interview, such as “Please craft five questions to ask, and five questions to be asked, that underscore what you would like us to know about you as a person and as a worker. These do not need to be business-as-usual interview questions. We welcome questions that spotlight overlooked talents or skills.” Or, employers could offer a 30-minute writing or problem-solving exercise a day or two in advance of the interview; the participants could use the task as a focus of discussion during the interview, experimenting with screen-sharing to look at documents or slides illustrating the assignment results. Some employers already have started using “One-Way Video Interviews,” asking candidates to video-record their answers to question prompts.

Innovating virtual interviews will help us identify new talent and draw from groups that might previously have gone unnoticed. For more, please see https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/talented_overlooked_introverted_lawyers

Let’s Identify Candidates Who Will Thrive in Teleworking Settings

In online interviews in the next few weeks and months, employers should consider techniques to identify candidates who would be an excellent fit for summer internships performed through teleworking. Interviews could focus on discerning such traits as:

• The ability to work independently (a skill many introverts possess)
• An aptitude for online research
• Strong writing, editing, and proofreading skills
• Proficiency at interacting in virtual communications platforms (Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, GChat)
• Creativity designing PowerPoints or Prezi presentations, or e-newsletters
• Strengths in collaborative problem-solving through online tools (annotating documents, using virtual whiteboards)
• The ability to focus on tasks like electronic document review
• A willingness and enthusiasm to learn all of the above

Anecdotally, this year, in the legal writing program at Brooklyn Law School where I teach, we experimented with a new writing assignment for our first-year law students: researching, writing, and designing a 1000-word electronic “client alert” about a current legal issue. The students’ work product demonstrated creativity in visual design, aptitude for embedding research links, and the ability to adapt their legal communication skills to a public audience. These kinds of research, writing, and electronic design assignments could be well-suited for virtual summer interns in many industries.

Let’s Craft Workable Virtual Summer Internship Programs

Employers should give thought to crafting workable virtual summer internship programs, which could attract diverse candidates with a wide array of skills, from any geographical location. A standard summer internship program could be shifted online by setting up:

• An initial online orientation (including, for example, training in timekeeping, online research databases, Track Changes or other document editing tools, and virtual communications platforms)
• Procedures for distributing and receiving assignments
• Online forums or other mechanisms for interns to ask questions about assignments
• Assignment workflow systems
• Weekly assignment due dates
• One-on-one mentoring systems
• Weekly online team meetings, to foster interaction, engagement, team-building, and collaboration
• Written and oral feedback methods for each assignment (including feedback rubrics)
• Protocols for completing timesheets or other ways of recording hours worked
• Connections with administrative staff
• Human resources support
• Well-being support

Employers should involve administrative and support staff in designing and facilitating these programs; many of these employees possess underused skills and credentials (technical proficiencies, counseling/mentoring experience, design thinking, etc.) that can be optimized in remote work settings.

Employers also should be open-minded about the reality that many remote employees’ most productive working hours might be outside “regular” business hours.

Let’s Help Students Succeed in Virtual Interviews and Internships

Our Millennial and Gen Z students are digital natives but they may not yet be fully accustomed to interviewing for jobs in virtual spaces led by non-digital natives thrust into online arenas this quickly. Let’s prepare summer internship candidates to shine by providing concrete technical, stylistic, and substantive guidance for the current circumstances.

Let’s train students in how to use Zoom, Skype, GChat, and other online platforms in a professional setting, which will differ from how they use these forums for personal communications. Let’s familiarize students (and ourselves) with tools like “raise hand,” “chat,” document-sharing, annotation, and virtual whiteboards. Let’s help students accentuate their research, writing, problem-solving, and time management skills that will enable them to excel in virtual summer internships. Let’s teach them how to convey their ability to be productive working independently, meet deadlines, and produce quality work product without the in-person oversight that would occur in a typical internship setting.

Let’s also discuss practical issues like:

• Communicating with employers about scheduling virtual interviews (including suggesting such a venue if the employer is leaning toward canceling interviews because of COVID-19)
• Ensuring appointments are correctly incorporated into students’ calendars
• Understanding protocols and etiquette in virtual communications
• Testing equipment and WiFi connections in advance (which will require consideration of students with limited resources or access to good WiFi connections or a quiet interviewing space)
• Practicing (perhaps with a career advisor or mentor) with the selected online platform and tools therein
• Deciding what to wear
• Creating a non-distracting background at home
• Starting the interview and engaging in introductions
• Making eye contact with the interviewers
• Considering posture and voice pacing (slowing down tempo)
• Demonstrating an appropriate level of enthusiasm and energy
• Reducing ambient noise during the interview
• Anticipating and having a backup plan for technical glitches
• Staying calm
• Amplifying one’s voice authentically
• Handling questions from the interviewers
• Asking questions during the interview
• Balancing listening, not interrupting, yet also engaging
• Respectfully asking interviewers to repeat a question or a response if the technology makes it difficult to hear the dialogue
• Ending the interview in a timely manner (a virtual handshake)
• Identifying next steps and appropriate follow-up.

Recruiters and educators are in a tremendous position right now to mitigate some of the concerns of students about disruptions to this academic semester and their prospects of landing (and maintaining) summer jobs. We can arm students with tools to navigate these uncertain times, and enhance their virtual communications skills.

This summer’s cadre of interns will be the future leaders of our schools, corporations, governments, and businesses. Let’s equip them to set high standards for communications, land jobs, and help keep our industries going in these volatile times.

**For anyone feeling unsure (and needing encouragement) about how a virtual summer internship program could realistically work, please reach out: heidi@theintrovertedlawyer.com. I worked remotely in New York City as a litigation attorney for a Virginia law firm for fifteen years (researching, writing, editing, negotiating, and timekeeping from my apartment); I also have managed numerous student research assistants through virtual engagement in my current role as a law professor. This is doable, will open doors for inclusion of many more diverse voices in our workplaces, and will help keep momentum going in these difficult times.