It’s just about that time of the year again, it happens at the end of every summer—your hard-working summer interns are getting ready to pack up and head back to school, look for another internship, or else maybe even start applying for full-time jobs.
Their workload and internship tasks may be winding down, but these last few weeks are crucial for your company to take action and conduct an exit interview.
Exit interviews are a great resource to help reveal insights that you wouldn’t be able to uncover otherwise.
There are many different types of exit interviews. You can conduct a face-to-face exit interview if you have a little more time on your hands and are still doing in person internships. If not, or if like many companies you're now managing remote internships, you can offer an exit interview form or template that your intern can fill out on their own time. Both of these options will collect valuable feedback for your company.
PRO TIP: Offer an incentive to get internship surveys completed in a timely manner - for example, an Amazon gift card for completing and submitting by a set date, or a drawing for a larger value prize to every survey received by a set date.
Regardless of which method you choose, to make the most of the exit interview, it's critical to ask these internship feedback questions.
This is a great way to learn a little bit more about your company culture from the inside. It can be difficult to get an accurate depiction of culture without asking others. Interns are an especially great resource to use because they have a fresh set of eyes and likely don't have the same biases that long-term employees have.
This will also set you up with the ability to identify trends within your company. Asking the same questions on a regular, ongoing basis lets you diagnose and analyze certain trends and look at differences and similarities among answers from intern to intern (or season to season). For example, your interns can help you identify how effective your mentoring programs and/or different opportunities for cross-departmental engagement are. Don’t forget to keep track of the answers to this question from previous exit interviews so that you can track responses over time. This may sound obvious, but it's often tempting to just look at one response set vs the last and informally compare the two. Keeping the actual data allows you to see a bigger picture, and turns a subjective analysis into a data-based one.
The answers that your interns give will also allow you to identify any concerns with the company culture that may need to be addressed. Uncovering these potential issues, and being able to address them before they turn into a serious problem, will help your company prevent losing any discouraged employees that are going unnoticed.
Many times, just changing the wording of a question can make all the difference - especially in an exit interview, and especially with interns who are likely hoping to land another internship with you, or even a full time job after graduation.
This question will give you valuable feedback on changes that you might have to make to your internship program, or even spur new ideas to improve on it. Remember that interns are a fantastic resource because of their fresh outlook and sharp minds - the same goes for feedback on their actual internship. You may just get some great ideas to implement next time.
This is a great question to ask because after working with a company for an extended period of time, it’s easy to overlook problem areas. Interns, on the other hand, have only been there for a few months, and a fresh set of eyes on your company might surface problems that otherwise are more difficult to identify.
This question also shifts the tone from any complaints that they may have, to a suggestion. This helps interns feel more at ease answering the question, and it also gives you actionable insights so that you can further examine and/or fix whatever issues your intern may have identified.