With so many eager school-leavers looking for employment opportunities, hiring an intern can seem like a good way to offer work experience to someone without the risks of a long-term commitment of a regular employee. However, you should consider whether hiring an intern would be the best move for your business. Here are some pros and cons you may run into:

Pros:

Extra help: It can be handy to have some extra assistance over busy periods in your business. This also ensures that the intern isn’t bored and gets hands-on experience taking on real-world tasks.

Potential employment: If you feel that the intern fits into the workplace well, you could offer them employment later on. This is often a smoother introduction to employment as they are already trained and familiar with the business. However, you are not obligated to offer them a job if you don’t feel they are a good fit.

Fresh perspectives: Interns can often offer new perspectives to work that you may not have thought about before. Having someone who hasn’t sunk into the routine of your workplace yet can be useful in offering new ways of thinking that could potentially improve your business.

Social media insight: Most interns are young and tech-savvy and could offer important insights into the world of social media for the new generation. They could help you devise relatable, trendy content for your social media that you may not have considered.

Cons:

Time commitment: Taking on an intern means that you will need to filter through applications and conduct interviews, as well as providing them with supervision and training. If you’re too busy to dedicate time to take care of an intern, it may not be the best move for your business.

Inexperienced: If you’re looking for some to take on roles that require knowledge and experience, an intern may not be the right choice as they often have limited work experience in career-based roles.

Less flexible: If an intern is still studying, then the hours they can offer you can be limited and variable depending on their timetable. As well as this, when exam periods arrive they could have an exam on a day they would normally work or may ask for time off to study.

Having a digital presence nowadays is crucial to getting the most out of marketing your business. However, being online puts you at risk of being a target for cybercrime, which means that you and your customers are at risk of being scammed, hacked, harassed or stalked. Business owners have legal responsibilities to ensure that their business and customer information is safe. For this reason, it is vital that you take precautions when putting anything online.

While social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have policies in place to prevent people being victim to cybercrime, it is still possible for hackers to dodge these measures and attack your business. It is therefore important that you implement your own safety measures to reduce the risk of being targeted.

Many cybercriminals target business’ social media accounts to get access to a large following of people they can trick or manipulate. It is crucial that your business account has a strong password consisting of at least 8 characters, with a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols. Ensure that only authorised users have access to the business’ social media accounts.

Create a social media use policy for your staff to ensure that they are aware of the consequences and risks of sharing account information and being careless with social media handling to reduce the risk of misuse and security breaches. It is also useful to provide a cybersecurity incident response management plan to help your business prepare for security breaches and know how to respond to them quickly and effectively to prevent them from escalating.

When planning a social media campaign, think about ways you can prevent your campaign from being hijacked by hackers to keep you and your followers safe. For example, if your campaign is a competition that involves participation from your followers such as them uploading a photo, think about ways to keep them safe from hackers. Perhaps you can provide guidelines for entering the social media competition, such as discouraging them from geotagging their location and ensuring they don’t have their house or any other personal details evident in the picture.

With COVID-19 threatening the health and safety of all communities around the world, it is now more important than ever to practise social distancing in the workplace. Social distancing includes ways to stop or slow the spread of infectious diseases and as the name implies, lessens the amount of contact between you and other people.

It is important to apply social distancing wherever possible within your workplace to minimise the risks of person-to-person infection and fulfil the responsibility you have to the safety and health of your colleagues and clients.

In the context of a workplace, social distancing means avoiding direct contact with your colleagues through a number of effective methods, including:

• Staying at home if you feel unwell or are sick
• Implementing work-from-home measures wherever possible
• Dividing in-office work hours between employees to reduce the number of people in an indoor space at any given time
• Stopping handshaking as a greeting – emerging alternatives include the “elbow bump” or a pat on the back
• Moving office meetings to online video or phone calls
• Limiting food handling and sharing of food in the workplace
• Having employees take lunch at their desk rather than in a communal lunchroom
• Cancelling non-essential business travels
• Promoting good hygiene practice such as coughing/sneezing into elbows
• Providing disinfectants and hand sanitisers for all staff to use during working hours
• Opening windows and adjusting air conditioning for better ventilation

As COVID-19 grows in severity, consider how you can enforce any of the above social distancing measures in your workplace and how you can encourage others to do the same.