Internship Policies on Recruitment in the United Kingdom - Essay Example

? Internship Policies on Recruitment in the United Kingdom s Submitted by s: Research Findings on Internship in the United Kingdom According to the Network Enterprise Europe London, (2010, pp. 2), firms that offer internship opportunities to graduates are in a position to enjoy a pool of skilled labor from committed employees who look forward to joining the work force. The interns too have the opportunity to gain work experience and insight into and extend their knowledge practically in the industry engaged in for a short period of time. They as well stand the chance of instant employment at the end of the internship period on the account of having built and shown a profile fitting into the organization culture attached. Statistic from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development reveals that more than 20 percent of the employers have plans to hire interns between April and September 2010, this being an increase from the summer of 2009 where only 13 per cent of the employers in the market were willing to hire these interns. On the other hand, the government has supported internships through the Graduate Talent Pool initiative that was initiated in July 2009 that aims at providing additional opportunities to the graduates that have just concluded their studies and are struggling to find work in the recession period. Although there are employment regulations governing the conduct of the organizations that are willing to employ these interns, there are no requirements for the internships to be paid. An internship charter drawn up by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development voluntarily has codes of practice details a list of six principles upon which an internship should be based to advance the interests of the intern as well as the hosting organization. It proposes that the recruitment of the interns should be done the same way employees are recruited and proper consideration placed upon the qualifications and skills they have best fit in with the roles they are expected to fill in the firm as well as the advertisement of the internship indicating the length of the internship period. The intern should be indicted into the firm and given the necessary support to integrate them into the firm, offer supervision to the intern, answer questions and provide feedback to the necessary issues they feel need assessment. A formal performance review should be conducted formally by the firm on the intern’s period and give an evaluation of both the firm and the intern. The employees as well as the interns should be treated with the same degree of professionalism as expected in the working environment and be allowed time off occasionally to attend job interviews or complete study requirements that come with the completion of the internship period. At the end of the internship period, the firm should be willing to give a certification or a reference letter to the interns with details of the roles undertaken as well as the results of the performance review conducted to help such an intern in his future career development. The Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organizations at any one time has 5 interns and roughly 30 staff engaged in a wide variety of responsibilities relating to research, lobbying, campaigning and press work, including drafting correspondence, articles and press releases, preparing policy briefings, and managing their own policy projects, (Acevo Policy Internships, 2013 p. 1). Under The Minimum Wage Act 1998, a worker is someone who has a contract of employment either oral or written with a firm to perform certain duties, services or work for another party that has to be expresses or implied in the stipulated contract and he must be paid a minimum wage unless they are subjected to some special exemptions. Hence it is not an outright assumption that an intern is a worker due to some internship characteristics to do with work experience, voluntary work or work shadowing schemes. In the general traditional approach, internship periods last six to twelve months, the interns usually required to work set hrs most of the time being fulltime, complete specific tasks within set time frames, their performance may or may not be monitored as well as evaluated and they contribute to an organization by undertaking tasks that would otherwise be done by a member of staff hence making a valuable addition to the regular work force. It has been generally proposed that if an intern has a list of duties contributing to the firm and has set the necessary working hours then the intern should be paid a minimum wage as it is not sufficient for the employer to believe that the law allows them to take unpaid internships as long as both sides understand that it is a voluntary position. Formulation Firm policies on internships Widely from the United States as well as the United Kingdom, unpaid internship has been illegal but the difference is in the enforcement of the laws, (Intern Justice, 2013, p. 1). The United Kingdom allows certain unpaid internship in circumstances where they are not classified as workers such as when they are in student internship, a requirement of the university which goes for a period of less than a year, voluntary workers for some sort of charity or political organization that only pays limited benefits and lastly in cases of work shadowing where the intern is not doing anything except following someone else. Whenever an intern is employed into the firm through the “Business Compact” ideology, it will be essential to uplift his working spirits by offering the intern a form of stipend to facilitate his minimal expenses that are met during the internship period on behalf of the firm. Whether an internship or worker employment, it illegal to employ a worker on the basis of the relation to senior partners, which is both a risk to the firm on incompetence’s and also seen as a discrimination against those who do not have an advantage during the recruiting process once the “Business Compact” is recruiting. The “Business Compact” system of internship should be made into a program that offers employment opportunities as advocated by most of the organizational recruitment strategies as well as the legal employment requirements. The firm can as well modify this recruitment program and make it an avenue to attract internship opportunities and maintain a pool of talents that will be engaged in the firm whenever a permanent employment opportunity arises. This will cut the necessary costs that come with the long recruitment procedures as the individual interns to be interviewed are already known to the firm as well as they are aware of the organizational culture they are getting into. It will be easier for the human resource department to re-orientate them to the work program as they are already used to the internship and are conversant with the firm rules and policies governing the working environment. Bonding with the other employees is a critical success factor of any form and the shorter time the team work formation takes, the more time employees recognize each other’s strengths and hence the ability to assist in achieving of the set goals and objectives. Hence it is convincing to say that the recruitment process will be made much easier and efficient when it comes to “Business Compact” program being made the asset to pool talents from the internship program closer to the organization. Recommended intern recruitment procedures Recruitment is the development and maintenance of adequate manpower resources involving the creation of a pool of available labor upon whom the firm or organization can depend when it needs additional employees. The recruitment policy is a part of the human resource management policy or personnel policy and the policies should provide a comprehensive framework for the implementation of the recruitment program. It may involve the organization system to the developed for implementing the recruitment programmed and the procedure be employed as a properly planned and systematic recruitment policy is necessary to minimize disruption of work due to changes in employees and to secure equitable distribution of employment opportunities, (Mondy, Noe, & Gowan, 2005, p. 8). Whether it is the recruitment of an intern or an employee, the process should be intense and comprehensive so that the right candidate has to be engaged fully into the firm fully. When formulating the recruitment policies in a firm, there are necessary considerations that need to be at the back of the mind such as government policies, personnel policies of other competing organizations, organization’s personnel policies, the recruitment sources, the recruitment needs, the recruitment costs as well as the selection criteria and preference. The recruitment process should have aims that will bear in mind the fairness of the process, the future needs as well as the present needs, consistency and the management of the public image of the firm. After the establishment of the recruitment objectives and the recruitment policies, an advertisement is made to attract the interested candidates. The firm has to establish the candidate selection criteria based on the profiles that they expect in terms of skills, competencies and experience. It may also seek to avoid stances that will target competitor employees, military veterans, retirees, its former employees or some other group that the firm wishes to exclude from the applicant list, (Boxall, Purcell, & Wright, 2007, p. 22). All these should be fully expressed in the recruitment advertisement of message that is given out to the public for the passing of the necessary recruitment requirements. The firm should be in a position to choose the best timing for the recruitment process after carrying out a simple research on the recruitment periods related to other firms. For a highly though of organization, the recruitment should be early in an established recruitment season as this may make higher the chances of hiring the very desirable candidates and in contrast a less attractive employers that starts the recruitment process early will find the best candidates who do not want to commit to a job due to the possibility of offers from other firms hence a double recruitment process. The recruitment message should be viewed in a totality perspective and enhance the various information exchanges an employer has with the applicant in the course of the recruitment process. The firm’s job website should be able to display the adverts as well as the local newspapers to increase the desired audience. The selection process used by the firm should be able to improve the matches between the employee skills and potential job requirements as a mismatch can lead to poor performance and the termination of the under qualified employees, or to dissatisfaction and voluntary quitting for an overqualified employee, (Larson, Lakin, Bruininks, Braddock, & American Association on Mental Retardation, 1998, p. 32). To ensure that the appropriate candidates are attracted, the proper planning of the recruitment process should be done by asking and answering the key questions in advance of hiring so that the recruitment process does not waste time and resources. Errors include not anticipating vacancies and labor shortages, not providing proper funding for recruitment, not mitigating negative factors and not effectively identifying the strengths of the recruiting team for it is unwise to rush an advertisement to the press before it is carefully crafted and endorsed. Getting a diverse workforce has to involve strategy which may include physical posting, electronic posting, personal contact, newspapers, trade journals, customs mailings, institutional capacity recruiting, internship programs, head hunting and noncompetitive recruiting, (Mathis, & Jackson, 2003, p. 51) Diversity implications for employers of employing interns The employment of interns in forms is a strategy that the firm and the intern used for mutual benefit in terms of gaining the necessary experience and the firm gets its work done at minimal cost. According to Liu, (2012, p. 267) there was significant influence on the culture of the firm where an accounting student was attached as a cooperation program based on firm internship is closely associated with the design of work involved. On the other hand, the top management of the CPA firms mutually gains knowledge through feedback on the student satisfaction programs and hence should cooperate more in arranging and organizing the internship programs (Berman, 2001, p.12). Employees benefit from the offering of internship programs e.g. a company could have a risk free method of evaluating prospective hires and motivated employees that is less expensive than hiring full time employees, (Coco, 2000, p. 40; Hodgson, 1999, p. 9). In addition, students returning to school after their internship can help the company be spreading a good word to other students about the particular organization, (Pianko, 1996, p. 33) one survey conducted by the National Association of College and Employers in 2011 found out that the responding organizations converted 57.7 percent of their interns to fulltime employees and this is the highest conversion rate since the NACE started tracking it an annual basis since 2001, (Kim, Kim & Bzullak, 2011, p. 697). The phenomenon seen here is agreeing with other researches done suggesting that the completion of an internship is linked with finding career-oriented employment more effectively, a benefit accruing to the employers in that they will not look far for the desired king of manpower to fit into the firm but from the pool of successful interns who have worked in the firm. The success of an internship period can be attributed to the quality of supervision from the host organization, the company’s practices and policies and compensation as well as the intern’s preparation academically and their initiative and attitude, (Beard and Morton, 1999, p. 47; Dale, 2003; p.12-87). Hence the interns in this case do play an important role in the shaping of the practices of the host organization as they improve their culture into a more accommodative structure for the m=new incoming employees. The employee work structuring in the firm will improve as the supervisor takes a keen interest in the formation of the work structure and the evaluation system, (Cutting and Hall, 2008, p. 101). Bibliography Acevo Policy Internships. (2013). Policy: Internships Available at http://www.acevo.org.uk/Policy+Advocacy/Internships (Accessed, Dec 4, 2013) Beard, F. and Morton, L. (1999). Effects of internship predictors on successful field Experience. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, Vol 53 No. 4, pp. 42-53. Berman, E. M. (2001). Human resource management in public service: Paradoxes, processes, and problems. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications Boxall, P. F., Purcell, J., & Wright, P. M. (2007). The Oxford handbook of human resource management. Oxford: Oxford University Press Coco, M. (2000), “Internships: a try before you buy arrangement”, SAM Advanced Management Journal, Vol. 65 No. 2, pp. 41-3. Cutting, R.H. and Hall, J.C. (2008), Requirements for a workable intern/practicum in the environmental sciences: experience for career and graduate. Journal of Geoscience Education, Vol. 56 No. 2, pp. 120-5. Dale, M. (2003). A manager's guide to recruitment & selection. London: Kogan Page Hodgson, P. (1999), “Making internships well worth the work”, Techniques: Making Education and Career Connections, Vol. 74 No. 6, pp. 38-9 Intern justice, (2013), Unpaid Internship Lawsuits. Unpaid Internship Laws – U.S. VS. U.K. – Difference is in enforcement. Available at http://internjustice.com/2013/07/30/unpaid-internship-laws-u-s-vs-u-k-difference-is-in-enforcement/ (Accessed December 4, 2013) Kim, B. E., Kim, K., & Bzullack, (2011). A survey of internship programs for management undergraduates in AACSB-accredited institutions. International Journal of Education Management. Vol. 26 Iss: 7, p.696 - 709 Larson, S. A., Lakin, K. C., Bruininks, R. H., Braddock, D. L., & American Association on Mental Retardation. (1998). Staff recruitment and retention: Study results and intervention strategies. Washington, DC: American Association on Mental Retardation Liu, G., (2012). A survey on student satisfaction with cooperative accounting education based on CPA firm internships. School of Business and Center for Accounting, Finance and Institutions, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, ChinaNetwork Enterprise Europe Network Enterprise Europe London, (2010). Employing Interns in the UK. Available at (Accessed December 4, 2013) Mathis, R. L., & Jackson, J. H. (2003). Human resource management. Mason, Ohio: Thomson/South-western. Mondy, R. W., Noe, R. M., & Gowan, M. (2005). Human resource management. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Pearson Prentice Hall. Pianko, D. (1996), “Power internships”, Management Review, Vol. 85 No. 12, pp. 31-3. Read More