The use of interns can be a touchy subject. Some companies swear by them; others swear at them. Oh, I know all the reasons why interns won’t work in your business. You have no room for them to work, it takes too long to train them, no one has time to make sure they’re keeping busy, we don’t have an available workstation or computer for them to work on, etc. Many companies believe there just isn’t a payback from hiring interns on a short-term basis.
If this is what you believe, you’re thinking about interns all wrong. Don’t hire them for 
what they can learn about your business, hire them for what they can bring to your business. For example, I have yet to meet a company executive who doesn’t value having a thorough competitive analysis of his competition.
Sometimes, this quest for market intelligence finds its way into MBO goals, and more often than not, it gets replaced mid-year for some other goal deemed to be more urgent. I completely understand this. After all, there is no revenue associated with gathering the research and it is a very time-consuming process.
But you can gain this kind of actionable intelligence by using paid interns. All it takes is one meeting or phone call with the career guidance center of a local college or university with a marketing department. Tell them you want one or two junior or senior-level students who have completed the basic marketing and research classes.
Hire these students and charge them will identifying the key competitors in your industry. Have them do a SWOT analysis of each competitor and prepare a summary of each company’s performance over the past three years. Have them evaluate what market opportunities you can exploit in order to gain market share, top line revenue growth, etc. Allow them to meet with and present their findings to your senior management team at the end of the term.
While you should meet with the interns regularly to make sure they are staying on course, you really can let them work on their own. Every college student has a laptop, and most of them have access to databases and proprietary software that you never heard of. Give them support in terms of access to information you’re willing to share with them, but, in general, turn them loose to work their magic. I’m willing to bet they surprise you and deliver actionable market intelligence for a tiny fraction of what you’d pay if you hired a marketing consultant. After all, paid inters generally earn between $8 and $12 an hour and are happy to get paid at all.
This strategy works for just about any size business in any industry. Again, think of what you’d like to know and what you would do with the information if you had it. Then, make the decision to go out and get it as cost-effectively as possible by using the resources of your local college or university.
