The question that decides whether a first internship works is not whether you can afford it. It is whether one of you has four or five unglamorous hours a week to spend teaching someone your context, reviewing their work, and answering questions that have obvious answers only to you. If neither of you has that […]
The question that decides whether a first internship works is not whether you can afford it. It is whether one of you has four or five unglamorous hours a week to spend teaching someone your context, reviewing their work, and answering questions that have obvious answers only to you.
If neither of you has that time in the next three months, the internship will disappoint everyone, including the student. Our internship resume guide for college students is written for the person on the other side of your listing, and what they are hoping for is defined learning goals, feedback, and work they can grow into.
One of you owns the internship. Two part-time supervisors means neither of you notices when the intern has been stuck since Tuesday.
Treat supervision and rework as part of the cost rather than assuming net productivity in month one. As a planning estimate only, allow several hours a week for briefing and review in the first few weeks, and expect early tasks to come back needing changes.
Decide who answers questions when the named supervisor is traveling or heads-down. Routine questions can be batched into one daily message, but blockers, anything security-related, and anything involving client data need an immediate route to whoever is available.
Choose something with a clear boundary, so review does not require you to stop your own work. As a hypothetical, a small internal tool that runs against test data, with an agreed end result and a demo scheduled for the final week, works far better than a slot in the middle of live client delivery.
Write the brief down before the first day. A page covering the goal, what counts as finished, what data is in scope, and where to ask for help gives you something to review against.
For a for-profit employer, an unpaid internship depends on the intern being the primary beneficiary of the arrangement. The Department of Labor’s primary beneficiary test weighs seven factors, including whether both sides clearly understand there is no expectation of compensation, how closely the internship ties to formal education through coursework or credit, and whether the intern’s work complements rather than displaces paid employees. No single factor settles it; the whole arrangement matters.
The real risk for a small team is the role’s shape. An intern brought in mainly to clear a backlog looks like someone filling a staffing need rather than someone receiving a structured educational experience.
Paying applicable wages resolves the unpaid-work question. It does not end the rest: payroll, classification, and state employment obligations still apply once someone is on your books.
If you are thinking of labeling the intern a contractor, know that the label in the agreement does not control the answer. The IRS weighs behavioral control, financial control, and the type of relationship, and its guidance says, “the keys are to look at the entire relationship and consider the extent of the right to direct and control the worker.”
An intern you train, schedule, supervise, and equip presents facts that point strongly toward employee status for federal employment-tax purposes. That is worth settling early, because misclassification can mean corrected filings and liabilities rather than a tidy adjustment later. Read the worker classification guidance once before you decide, and note that this test governs federal employment taxes rather than every wage, state-law, or copyright question.
A two-person company can still apply least privilege. Grant access to the repositories, folders, and systems the assigned project requires, and leave the rest closed until there is a reason to open it.
That means a separate repository or branch rather than organization-wide access, a client folder rather than the whole drive, and no administrative permissions on anything. An agreement about confidentiality does not do the work that access controls do.
Ownership is the part small teams discover late. Under the U.S. Copyright Office’s guidance on work made for hire, work prepared by an employee within the scope of employment belongs to the employer from the outset, and a commissioned work from someone outside an employment relationship qualifies only in nine narrow categories, with a signed written agreement saying so.
Whether a particular deliverable fits that framework is a question about the actual working relationship, which copyright law assesses under agency principles. Neither paying nothing nor writing “contractor” on a document settles it. The practical answer is to put confidentiality and an assignment of what the intern creates into an agreement that matches the relationship you have set up, and an online legal platform like ConsumerShield provides state-compliant forms and guides for both, which saves a two-person team drafting them from a blank page. Sign them before the accounts are created, and keep the signed copies somewhere other than the shared inbox.
An internship is worth having partly because of what the intern can point to afterward, and a broad confidentiality obligation can quietly take that away. Settle at the start what they may show publicly, whether names and figures need to be anonymized, and who approves the version that goes into a portfolio.
Name a final week in the offer letter, and have the conversation about what happens next two weeks before it. When it ends, revoke access that day, and ask for company information on personal devices to be returned or deleted, with written confirmation.
Then write the reference while it’s fresh, and be specific about what they built and what they were responsible for. That, plus approved work they are allowed to describe, is what the student came for.
The Future of Customer Engagement: AI Agents, Automation, and Personalization 
25 Ways To Get More Real Reviews For Business From Your Customers 
How Visual Branding Can Help Businesses Connect With Customers 
