With so many students out there looking for internships and experience, it definitely should not be that difficult to find an intern. You can quickly find an intern in places like Craigs's list or by running an advertisement in your local newspaper, but the quality of applicants will not be that high. At InternProfits, we personally like to deal with colleges and universities as we find them to be the best places to find the highest caliber interns. To begin, you need to identify the school or schools that you want to approach. If you attended a trade/vocational school or college/university, it is usually a great idea to start your search there. We suggest hiring interns from your Alma matter because having a common interest with your intern is always a great start to an internship. Being an alumni may also help you when speaking to the intern coordinators at the school because it is a natural way for you to grow rapport with that person and quickly and easily create credibility for your business.

If you didn't go to a trade/vocational school or college/university, then you might decide to focus on hiring interns from schools that are geographically close to your small business. While it is not important to find an intern that can physically come to your place of business, it may be nice for you to be able to meet with prospective interns for interviews or to network with the school's coordinators. Another option that many small businesses choose to do is hire virtual interns from well known educational institutions. A virtual internship is a situation where the intern works from their own home or office and communicates with you over the internet on a daily/weekly basis. Normally computer science, journalism, or internet marketing students will choose to take virtual internships. Virtual internships are starting to become a very hot trend because it gives employers an almost unlimited pool of high quality applicants.

Our biggest suggestion outside of hiring interns from your Alma matter would be to look for a school that offers majors in the area you are searching for an intern. For example, not every school offers a computer science and software development program to their students. If you are looking for an intern to help with your computer systems, then it would be best to find a university that offers those kinds of classes.