Past work: marketing agency

Restructuring of Corporate Summer Internship Program

As Office Manager at the Toronto office of Free For All Marketing (now Proof Experiences), I worked with the Recruiting team and senior managers to restructure the Summer Internship Program. At the time, the program was vital to the agency’s success in carrying out their clients’ experiential marketing campaigns at various festivals and other events throughout Canada during the summer season. Previously, the program had little structure; issues ranged from the inability to attract qualified candidates, the lack of a proper onboarding process, to little operational support throughout the internship.

In restructuring the entire program, I worked internally with Senior and Associate Account Managers and former interns who had moved on to become Associates, and the Finance, Logistics, and IT departments. Externally, I engaged with various post-secondary institutions across Canada, and vendors such as our preferred car rental company, storage facilities across the country, and our dedicated travel agent.

The restructuring project addressed issues from end-to-end starting with the recruitment process, onboarding and training, deploying the interns on their individual marketing campaigns across Canada, providing administrative support for the interns during their time on the road, creating a new process for both interns and managers to evaluate the work performed, and at the end of the summer, either offboarding the interns, or integrating them full-time into our team as Account Associates. With such an expansive project to take on, I maximized everyone’s efforts by ensuring communication was clear and open during meetings, and by using the best collaboration tools on hand while also being mindful of our team’s diversity in work styles.

The entire undertaking was extremely complex and spanned around nine months. Below is a broad overview of the steps involved:

• Creating relationships with key contacts at colleges and Universities to put the agency in front of more qualified students

• Implementation of an Applicant Tracking System to manage the application process

• Coordinating internal schedules to review resumes and book interviews

• Collecting feedback from managers and recruiters to keep moving candidates through the screening process

• Working with Finance and IT to create an onboarding process, and drafted an Intern Orientation Guide to ensure that interns would have all the tools they needed from day one

• Supporting Account Managers in putting together a two-day training session for the new hires, including facilitating a training session on company administration policies and procedures

• Connecting the interns to our vendors so that they felt supported on the road and provided administrative support when needed

• Working with Senior Management and Recruiting to design, deploy, and analyze the results of the Internship Program evaluation survey at the end of the program

• Wrapping up with interns moving on from the agency and onboarding those offered full-time roles as Associates.

While there was no quantitative data to compare the previous year’s program to the results of the newly enhanced program, I can confidently say that we were able to reach a wider range of schools, thus widening our candidate pool. My colleagues provided me with feedback on the new processes I implemented; we were able to better coordinate applicants through our initial group interview process and better track potential candidates through the rest of the selection process and not lose them to other opportunities due to inattention. The Associates who had interned the previous summer said that the training and onboarding processes were more well-rounded and better organized than what they had experienced. As well, with both quantitative and qualitative data from the program survey, the company could apply more improvements in the future.