Finding and Hiring Interns

…and also, letting them go.

HR Guardrails

Paying for Your Intern

Offer Process

Termination

1. Internship sponsor: The person who is hiring the intern and approving their timesheet (probably you?)
2. HR Administrator: Currently, Bomee and Erika

Know before you start

• Interns are always paid, unless they are receiving class credit.
• Must be W2 employees unless they are working through a university program that requires them to be 1099 contractors
• Interns must have internship work plans

We do not host unpaid interns because:

1. We to provide opportunity to students whose financial situations may require they earn while they learn.
2. Unpaid internships usually fail to meet legal requirements, unless they are in partnership with an educational institution.

Sponsoring an Intern or Student Worker

Each intern or student worker must be accompanied in their internship experience by a Sponsor who makes sure that their educational goals are met.

Responsibilities of a Sponsor include:

• Meet at least weekly with the intern or student
• Helping to define educational goals and timelines
• Supporting the student in making steady progress against their goals, and when necessary, to help pivot and adapt in response to new information
• Pro-actively checking on the quality of their remote/asynch experience, encouraging them to understand and articulate their needs as a remote worker, and making the internship experience fun
• Cultivating manager-of-one-ship by modeling and encouraging workplace behaviors that embody responsible autonomy and teamwork
• Using their professional network to connect the student to further opportunities

Student Workers

Student workers are part-time team members who engage in practical learning by taking on specific day-to-day responsibilities. Unlike interns, the work of student workers might not have a “start, middle, and end.”

Sponsors should keep in mind that student works are here to learn how to be effective managers-of-one and to learn about our industry.

1. Work assigned should make appropriate allowances for inexperience:
2. Be clear and thorough, and ask for confirmation that the information you tried to communicate has been received.
3. Help them set appropriate timelines (enthusiasm may lead to unrealistic deadlines that cause unnecessary stress!)
4. Operationalize the saying “feedback is a gift”:
5. Give praise where praise is due!
6. Provide kind, but unequivocal constructive guidance. Accepting work without comment that do not meet professional standards does the student no favors. Taking on student workers means we intend to help them learn what these standards are.
7. Draw on your own experience to provide tips and pointers. None of us entered the workforce with all of the professional capabilities we have today! Offer how you would approach a job to be done and, more importantly, explain why.
8. Encourage and support independent work and critical enquiry:
9. Model and encourage manager-of-one behavior
10. Prompt critical thinking about the what and the how of our work

Manager-of-one guidance for interns and student workers

Sponsors should keep in mind that interns are also learning how to be effective managers-of-one and to learn about our industry.

1. Work assigned should make appropriate allowances for inexperience:
2. Be clear and thorough, and ask for confirmation that the information you tried to communicate has been received.
3. Help them set appropriate timelines (enthusiasm may lead to unrealistic deadlines that cause unnecessary stress!)
4. Operationalize the saying “feedback is a gift”:
5. Give praise where praise is due!
6. Provide kind, but unequivocal constructive guidance. Accepting without comment work that does not meet professional standards does the intern no favors. Taking on interns means we intend to help them learn what these standards are.
7. Draw on your own experience to provide tips and pointers. None of us entered the workforce with all of the professional capabilities we have today! Offer how you would approach a job to be done and, more importantly, explain why.
8. Encourage and support independent work and critical enquiry:
9. Model and encourage manager-of-one behavior
10. Prompt critical thinking about the what and the how of our work
11. Recap with them after meetings. This can help us make sure none of the points raised are missed, but also lets the intern know that everyone’s experience and point of view are valid and can contribute to moving us forward.
12. Let the intern know that this is not a one-way street–their experience can apply too (cf. bring your whole self to work)

HR Guardrails

Justworks, our PEO, defines a Paid Intern as:

a full-time or part-time, hourly, non-exempt employee who is: (i) being paid at least the applicable minimum wage rate and overtime pay for overtime hours worked; (ii) not eligible for benefits; and (iii) working for your company for no more than 90 calendar days.

The internship sponsor should make sure that the intern’s hours and internship duration stay within these parameters. Coloring outside these lines may create a liability for our company. At best, this means we’ll have to spend money consulting our employment lawyers (they are $750 an hour!) and at worst, we could be sued. Please be diligent!

All Interns

1. Interns who are in school and taking classes may work up to 20 hours per week (up to 18 hours per week if funded by the NYSERDA workforce program)

2. Interns funded by the NYSERDA workforce program may work a total of 480 hours

3. Offer letter must include hours of work, which may be negotiated so it suits the situation, so that as the intern’s sponsor, you know when they are expected to be working. e.g. 9-5 EST for summer interns, or something different for term-time interns

Summer Interns

• Start date: no earlier than May 1
• End date: no later than Sept 15
• Interns may work up to 40 hours per week
• Not eligible for benefits other than legally mandated Worker’s Comp

Part-Time Academic Term Interns

1. Fall and Spring Interns generally work part-time. They may work an average of 25 hours and less than 30 per week (i.e. they don’t have to work exactly 25 each week, but they can’t work more than 29 on any given week)

2. Not eligible for benefits other than legally mandated Worker’s Comp, unless they work more than 90 calendar days.

3. Interns who are with us for longer than 90 calendar days:

   • The internship sponsor must notify the HR administrator
   • HR admin must update their employment Justworks status from “Paid Intern” to the correct employee class and benefits class
   • The intern is eligible for NY Paid Sick Leave, accruing at a rate of 1 hour per 30 hours worked
   • The intern must receive a new offer letter reflecting their new employee class and benefits class, depending on their average weekly hours worked:

	Less than 30 hours per week	30 hours per week
Employee Class	Part-time, hourly, non-exempt	Part-time, hourly, non-exempt
Benefits Class	None	Part-time benefits class
PTO	NY Paid Sick Leave only	NY Paid Sick Leave only

Fall and Spring Interns Working 30 or more hrs/wk

Internships should not be used to hire semi-permanent employees at low cost! Interns who work 30 hours per week on average are “full time” according to the rules of the Affordable Care Act. Internships with 30 or more hours per week must meet the following criteria:

• Internship duration may not exceed 90 calendar days. Period.
• At time of hiring, must have graduated from college or university within the past 12 months.
• Must have an educational purpose (this is true of all internships, of course)

Full-time interns do not receive benefits other than the legally mandated Worker’s Comp and NY Paid Sick Leave.

What do our lawyer’s say?

Received from Kathryn​ T. Lundy, Partner, Smith, Gambrell & Russell, LLP on August 2, 2023. Emphasis is hers:

A Company is required to provide certain benefits to interns retained as non-exempt employees. The benefits required vary based upon the size of the Company, the length of the internship and the number of hours the interns work each week.

Specifically, assuming the Company has 5 or more employee (or net income of more than $1 million), the Company is required to provide New York Paid Sick Leave time at a rate of one hour for every thirty hours worked.

The Company is also required to ensure the interns are covered through Workers’ Compensation Insurance.

With respect to health insurance, the Affordable Care Act applies to employers with 50 or more employees and requires employers to offer affordable minimum value health coverage to their full-time employees who work on average at least 30 hours per week.

There is limited exception for “seasonal employees”, who are employed for six months or less, and the period of employment must begin each calendar year at approximately the same time (i.e., summer). If full-time employees (interns included) are seasonal employees, then they don’t have to be offered coverage within 90 days of their date of hire. Instead, these employees are treated as variable hour employees.

If the interns work more than 30 hours per week and are not “seasonal employees”, as defined above, the Company should speak to their insurance broker and consider offering coverage to the full-time interns to avoid a penalty. As a practical matter, most of them are likely on their parents’ health insurance plans and won’t take it (but the Company will be protected from any potential penalties).

Paying for Your Intern

NYSERDA Workforce Reimbursement

NYSERDA’s Clean Energy Internship Program provides partial reimbursement for intern wages. To be eligible, interns must either either:

• Currently attending or have attended NYS college or university within the last 12 months

• Reside in NYS even if attending a college or university outside of NYS within the last 12 months

Interns may not have been previously employed at the host business, either as an intern, contractor, or full-time employee.

The program reimburses $15.30/hr (90% of the maximum hourly rate of $17/hr). We can pay higher wages, and we do, but the reimbursement is capped at $15.30/hr.

Internships must last a minimum of 8 weeks and be a minimum of 80 total hours, and is capped at 480 hours or 12 months, whichever is fewer. If the intern is taking classes, NYSERDA will only cover up to 18 hrs/week on average; if the intern isn’t taking classes, the max if 40 hrs/week.

Once we select an intern candidate, they will need to apply to the program (a simple process, usually with a 1-2 day turnaround). Once they are in the program, we need to submit an application for them no more than 30 days after the intern’s start date.

We can invoice NYSERDA via their portal at the end of the internship or no more than once every 12 weeks. In addition to the invoice itself, this requires copies or records of paycheck stubs and/or a payroll summary showing hours work, wages, and taxes. This information is available in Justworks.

CUNY Summer Interns via Company Ventures

As a graduate of the Company Ventures City Fellowship program, we have access to Company’s CUNY summer intern program. Details may change year to year, but the main benefits are 1) fully-paid intern and 2) curated matching process.

Offer Process

1) Offer Letter - via Roger

The intern offer template lives in Roger. Intern offer letters are different from a regular part-time offer letter. The template will prompt you to fill in:

• Position: Usually, name of department + “Intern”
• Start date
• End date
• Compensation: Defaults to $25 (edit to $20 if undergrad)
• Estimated weekly hours: Defaults to 27. See above regarding hours.
• Hours of work: Defaults to 9-5 EST
• Maximum total internship hours: Defaults to 480
• Maximum duration: 90, the maximum allowed
• Duties: 1-2 sentence summary of intern duties

Please get on the same page regarding start date, end date, and hours of work before filling out the offer letter.

You may sign your own interns’ offer letters if you have been authorized to sign and the budget and intern hire have been duly approved. Please check to make sure that you’ve ticked these boxes before proceeding.

The offer letter must be accepted (countersigned) by your intern. Please confirm that the signed offer letter is saved to the intern’s personnel files.

2) PICAA - via Hubspot

Interns must also sign a Proprietary Information and Competitive Activities Agreement. The easiest way to send this is to do it from within Hubspot. Find the contact item for your intern, scroll down to the “Agreements” section on the right sidebar, and select the Enter Name - PICAA template.

The PICAA is signed by Bomee and by the intern. Please fill in the Cadence signer field with Bomee’s name and email. Please confirm that the signed PICAA is saved to the intern’s personnel files.

3) Justworks Setup & I-9

Once your intern has signed the offer letter, please advise one the HR Administrator that they are ready to be set up as an employee in Justworks. Advise your intern that they will receive a Justworks set-up email, and also that they will need to send you employment verification documents (form I-9) once they have done that.

4) Proceed to new user setup request

Please fill out the new user request form in Slack.

Tracking Sheet

Please enter your intern’s information in the intern tracking sheet. Note there are two tabs!

Termination

At the end of the internship, we are generally required to provide a termination notice. Please use the template in Roger. Depending on the state of residence, we may also be required to provide a state-specific termination form. Please check Justworks (search for their state of residence) for termination requirements. If there is not a termination-specific document, look for “compliance starter guide” for the state. If a form is required, upload it to Justwoks with “signature required.”