One of the best ways coaches and consultants can create a more mutually beneficial partnership with their clients is to help them develop their talent pipeline. The job market and state of hiring is constantly influx and having a steady internal team that allows for growth and employee retention is highly important for an organization’s overall success.
A smart way to start building a talent pipeline is to launch an internship program. By accessing fresh new talent still in school or early in their careers, you can help them develop the skills necessary for success in your clients’ organizations.
Here are 3 ways consultants can help develop an internship program for their clients, and the benefits that doing so will bring your partnerships.
1. Bring Expertise to Benchmarking
The first step to finding the right intern is understanding the job tasks your clients need performed! It can be tempting to offer up a generalized job description to receive maximum candidate application, but that will result in a loss of value for both an organization and the intern themself if they aren’t a good fit. Coaches and consultants can help organizations see the value in finding a high-quality candidate with the right tools and the right processes. This can be achieved through expanding your benchmarking practices within your clients’ team!
If you’re unfamiliar with benchmarking, you can read the first-hand account of a TTI SI’s team experience here. To break it down simply, benchmarking is the process of creating the profile of the ideal candidate for a position, and then measuring all candidates against that profile. It can be used to measure an employee in their current role, but it’s most commonly used in the interview process.
Working with your clients to create a benchmark for their ideal intern will help guide the hiring process and help make sure that a candidate is a good fit for the team. Benchmarking for skillset might not be as important when it comes to interns but behavior and motivation are crucial for role fit. Benchmarking will help you discover if your potential hirer is a team player and if the position will draw on their internal motivations. It will also help your clients discover how they will fit in with their future team.
2. Help Establish Company Values
One of the best ways to help support your clients is to use your expertise to help them build a healthy and thriving company culture. When you’re considering adding younger people to your team, there’s a few things you need to know. Gen Z already makes up 24% of the workforce, according to Forbes, and that number is only growing over time.
A hallmark of this generation is their desire for a progressive professional environment— “Gen Z no longer forms opinions of a company solely based on the quality of their products/services but now on their ethics, practices and social impact,” Deloitte reported. Young workers want to invest their careers in companies with strong values and practices!
This is where coaches and consultants come in; your work to identify issues, build strong leaders, and strengthen communication and understanding within teams will contribute to a more ethical, versatile work environment. Use your expertise and the right tools to create a positive organizational culture, and your clients’ will attract top talent, even at the internship and entry level.
3. Create a Team Report
Another way to help develop an internship program is to look at the current team using a Team Report. A Team Report helps individuals understand each other better, identifies possible origins of conflict, and will ensure that your clients can see what their team is currently missing. If everyone on a team has similar behavioral types, there can be opportunities to introduce new team members which will introduce more diversity of thought.
Whether your clients are looking for an intern who is very similar to their current team or they want to make a more adventurous hire, using a Team Report will show you new areas of development and possibility.
One of the benefits to hiring an intern is the opportunity to experiment with different behavioral types and personalities on a team. While it’s obviously not an intern’s responsibility to influence the general behavior and energy of a team, hiring someone different into a team that is very similar will be a good way to shake up dynamics and move in the right direction.
“The process was challenging at first when I entered a team that used assessments,” said Kyle Rossman, TTI SI’s current marketing intern. “Learning the intricacies of how each assessment worked and what it’s purpose was took some time to adjust to. In the end, I found the process very interesting and I believe that I am a better coworker because of it.”
Moving Forward With a Strong Internship Program
Helping your clients find the right talent at every level will build a stronger connection and a better working relationship. By utilizing the benchmarking process, helping them develop a healthy company culture, and finding the places for opportunity in their teams will help you help them find their next hire and build their talent pipeline.
Are you interested in joining the network of consultants, coaches, and entrepreneurs who use TTI SI as their assessment provider and partner? Contact us here to get started.
