Kevin Kerner: 0:01

Hey everyone, this is Kevin Kerner with Tech Marketing Rewired. We just wrapped up our first internship at Mighty True in a long time it's probably been at least a couple years and I wanted to take a hard look at what worked, what didn't and how to make it better next time. So to do that, I turned to my friend, cheryl Rodness, who's the head of global brand at Quest Global. Cheryl's worked with a lot of people over the years and has built internship programs at scale during her time at Gina Burke, cal, ex-anne and Quest, and she's really one of the best people I know to talk about how to do this thing right.Kevin Kerner: 0:32

In this episode, we got into why so many internship programs fail from the start, the systems and playbooks that make them successful, and how to evaluate interns beyond GPA. We also talked a bunch about what AI means for the future of your early career work, and just talked about AI in general. It was a really fascinating talk. If you're a college student looking to start an internship or be attracted by a company that's hiring interns, or if you're someone like me who wants to make their internships better, this is a really good watch, so let's get into it. This is Tech Marketing Rewired. Cheryl, thanks for being here. I'm really looking forward to this one.

Cheryl Rodness: 1:17

Well, thanks for having me, Kevin. This is a topic that is very, very close to my heart as we grow in our careers. For me, the most important thing is to make sure that we're developing the next generation of leaders, and what better way to start than with interns and kids coming out of school? But if we don't train them right from the beginning, goodness knows what shape we're going to leave our companies in.

Kevin Kerner: 1:37

For sure. It just gives them such perspective. It's amazing. Can you please start by just walking through your career journey and how you got into it? Why did internships become such a big interest for you?

Cheryl Rodness: 1:48

Well, to start all the way back, I am a career marketer.

Cheryl Rodness: 1:52

I have been primarily in the technology area for 20 years or so I hate to date myself, but that's the truth and I've worked for great companies from IBM to Juniper, where you and I met Unisys, Calix, where I really built up my skills and internship programs, and now at Quest Global.

Cheryl Rodness: 2:12

The reason I got into internships was, funnily enough, I think it spurred my interest because I've got two kids who are in college and, as I saw, as they were looking for summer jobs, the challenges that they had in one finding an internship and for my younger son, who was actually in a co-op program, learning from him, the experiences he was going through in those co-ops varied greatly and I thought what a shame. Companies are paying students to come in and they're not getting the best out of the students and in some cases the students are getting actually crappy experiences. And so I thought if I developed a program that would help both the student and the company, it would be a win-win. And so I had the opportunity at Juniper. I did a little bit there, but really built it when I was at Calix.

Kevin Kerner: 3:01

I sort of agree. It's like if you're going to spend time actually doing this with a young student, like the worst thing you could do is do it bad and then send them off as a start in their career, where they just don't have good perspective. I wonder where you see most. Where have you seen most companies go wrong when bringing in interns? Like, where are the big problems with internship programs?

Cheryl Rodness: 3:20

The biggest failure, quite honestly, is right at the beginning, when you decide you want to have an intern or an internship program but you actually don't think about what the student is going to do. I have seen people say yeah, we know we have lots of work to do, let's bring on an intern. The intern shows up and they have nothing formalized. They don't know what the projects are, they don't know what the goals are, the outcomes, and so that student comes in and really flounders. They wait for stuff to be sent to them. They can't you know, they can't figure out what they need to do, who they need to connect with, what's expected of them. The manager hasn't thought it through, the manager doesn't give them time and right from the get go, it falls apart. So when I've built programs it starts from the ground up. I can walk through the steps for you if you want, if that's easier and then we can dive into each one.

Kevin Kerner: 4:03

Yeah, I'd love to talk about that and it sounds like there's if I can paraphrase you, it's really there's no system in place, it's just you're. You find that like in my experience, you find that maybe you're a manager who gets an intern, you're told to take an intern and you don't really have a system in place to do it. You just get the intern and then you have to deal with this person. He's now a cheap labor, let's say.

Cheryl Rodness: 4:24

Yeah, you're either told you're getting an intern or you're asked hey, do you want an intern? And you're over swamped, or your team's over swamped and you go, yeah, I'd love an intern. And that's where it ends. Nobody thinks about it after that, till the person shows up and it's like, oh, what am I gonna do with you? Yeah, so walk through it, maybe at it really clearly and listen for the things that you need to hear to know that that person is going to fit into your team, into your company, to your expectations. So that's the first thing. The second is, before they actually show up, you have a series of projects developed for them with an expectation of what they need to do, who they need to connect with, what the outcomes are, so that when they actually show up, you can walk through those with them. The second thing you want to do is make sure that you assign them a buddy before they show up and that there's somebody who is equivalent in age that they can actually talk to, so they can reach out to you and go. I got a stupid question, don't want to bug my manager or I can't get to my manager. Can I ask you something? So it's a peer, it does not have to be in your department, but it's a peer that they feel comfortable talking to. The next thing you want to do is make sure that that person is invited to every team meeting, whether or not it involves the work that they're doing. You want to make them feel included and know what's going on, and it gives them a broader perspective as to how their work fits into what the broader team is doing.

Cheryl Rodness: 6:15

The other thing you want to do is make sure that your executives at the company are fully onboarded. So one of the things I did is I set up a series of weekly sort of meet and greets with executives. So there would be one CXO assigned every week to have a talk with the intern or intern group if they were a cohort and they would come in and it would be an hour meeting and they would give a bit of a background about who they are and what they did in the company and why they felt having interns was valuable to the company, and then talk a little bit about their journey, because it helps for students to hear all the different types of journeys you can have over your career so they don't feel like they're so locked when they're in school and then you open it up to Q&A. You give them a half an hour for Q&A and, if you're smart, you see a couple of questions so that the students feel comfortable asking because something's been done first and breaks the ice. Then I always set up a session or two through the summer with HR so that they can actually bring in their resumes and talk about resumes and talk about interviewing, or a session just for the juniors and the seniors to be able to talk, or rising juniors and seniors to talk about what to ask when they're looking to interview for their first job.

Cheryl Rodness: 7:19

And then there's weekly checkpoints with your manager on status of your projects and nobody feels like they're failing.

Cheryl Rodness: 7:25

There is probably a once-a-month checkpoint with the CXO that you report up to, if you can, so that they see visibility of what they're doing. Before the end of the summer of the internship I would set up a cohort session for the students to present the work that they've done to the CXOs as a group, or at least the one that heads up their department, depending upon how many interns were in that group. I created a template that helped them understand how you present to a CXO. Walk through all their presentations beforehand to make sure that they were appropriate and they demonstrated the value they brought back to the company. And then for the managers who hired them, we did an out-of-program evaluation, where a lot of companies have their own nine-box system for evaluating their employees. We had a four-box for students so that we could then go back and rank the students and when we were looking to fill the positions you always started with the top right quadrant and that was kind of the system.

Kevin Kerner: 8:31

Yeah, that is incredible. I mean, that's end to end. Now I want to start back up at the top, because there's some really good stuff in there and things that I probably got wrong. What type of jobs do you think are right for internships, or how specific do you have to get in the job description when you're looking for an intern?

Cheryl Rodness: 8:48

It depends on the job. So when the last company I did this with, we did internships, literally we had 65 interns across the entire organization, including legal, believe it or not so all the way through. So if you're talking specifically about marketing, you have to think about where you need the help. First of all, a lot of places are finding that social media is a great place to add internship talent and, honestly, it is because it's the interns and the students who better understand the platforms. They understand the type of content that their friends are consuming. They know the best way to videotape, to edit all those kinds of things. So I've often found social media to be a really good project for an intern.

Cheryl Rodness: 9:34

But there's also copywriting that could be done. There could be art direction that could be done. If you're looking for in-house people, you take them out of schools where they've got art programs or English majors for writing programs, typically where they want to become copywriters. You can look at it from a demand gen standpoint in helping them understand how you build flows or how you use AI to support your first draft of press releases or copy. It can be all over the board, but think about it as stuff sort of at the bottom of the funnel. That needs to get done in projects where you still have oversight, but people have some creativity to do the work.

Kevin Kerner: 10:17

Would you recommend that you keep it pretty narrow? Or do you, if, let's say it's a marketing intern, do you bring them in and say, okay, you're going to be working on social media this summer. Or do you say, okay, there's a bunch in the work stream that you know we could have you work in and we're going to give you full visibility to it all. What works best to?

Cheryl Rodness: 10:34

whether or not they can handle that array. I would say, from a lot of what I've seen, giving them one project, a good project, or a series of projects within one area works better because they can get deep or at least they can get more proficient. If you move them around to too many things, there are too many connection points they have to make, too many parts of the puzzle that they have to understand. That, I think, is a lot harder, unless they're really adept. That's hard.

Kevin Kerner: 11:05

Yeah, and I suppose it still needs to prove some value back to the company too. So you want to point it in an area where they can actually make an impact. Otherwise you're kind of wasting money.

Cheryl Rodness: 11:14

You need to know what you expect to have delivered and you need to set those expectations. You need to help them deliver. You got to be available to answer the questions and then sure that they can get the work done. The first time is never going to be right, the second time probably not, but they'll get there. But if you're not giving them the attention they need to understand what has to be done, you'll never get the output and then you'll go. Well, that was a waste of my time.

Kevin Kerner: 11:39

Yeah, that's really good advice. Okay, so now let's say you've identified a position, source the candidate. Sourcing like intern sourcing. We had our intern this summer was referred by a friend of mine who is a university professor, so it was real easy because this is my best student. But had I not had that channel, I wouldn't have known where to go. Where have you found the best resources are to actually source the right candidate, like where do you get the right candidates from and how do you establish those supply lines?

Cheryl Rodness: 12:07

Schools are a great place. I hate to admit it, but children of friends and people that work with you. They've always got students who are looking for summer jobs. If they're the right fit, and then quite honestly on LinkedIn. You can post a summer internship job on LinkedIn, as many companies do Do it organically. You don't have to pay for a paid ad, just have everybody on your team post hey, I've got a job open. Submit your resume here. We were getting over 500 resumes per internship at one point in time. I mean you will have no shortage. The problem you have is sifting through them and deciding who you want to go with and who you want to interview. The interviewing time takes time.

Kevin Kerner: 12:47

Yeah. So beyond the GPA and sort of their resume, what qualities have you found that predict a strong intern?

Cheryl Rodness: 12:56

I've never looked for a GPA, to be honest. I look for what are you studying? Talk to me about your projects, Talk to me about what you're interested in as a summer intern. I look for someone who's got hunger, someone who's got aspiration, someone who is willing to ask for help, doesn't believe that they know it all, and someone who's going to fit into the team If they can show me that they understand marketing or what we're looking to do. And you can get that through conversation, talking about projects they've done at work, at school rather, and what part they had if it was a team project, et cetera, and just get a sense for how hungry they are to learn and to do.

Kevin Kerner: 13:40

Yeah, the interest part is really interesting to me because my son had an internship and he worked for Texas Parks and Wildlife but he was interested in AI and so they gave him not just the traditional Texas Parks and Wildlife stuff to do but they also gave him an AI project which he was super interested in and he that was his interest going in and it aligned with their interests and so he just he went after it really hard, which is really fun to see.

Cheryl Rodness: 14:04

Yeah, If you can align a project to what the student is interested in, has a passion for, they'll work twice as hard. This is something that they have an interest and passion for. It's not just, no, I've got to get a summer internship or oh, I need to make some money so I can go back to school, but there's a real hunger and a desire and if you can hire for hunger and aspiration, you'll do well.

Kevin Kerner: 14:25

Yeah, so you went through onboarding and how that works. Walk me through what you've seen work in a little more detail.

Cheryl Rodness: 14:32

So you tell your team you're bringing on a summer intern, this is their name, this is what they'll be doing, this is who they'll be reporting to. And then you say I want a buddy, I need someone to partner with this person that when they have a question they can just ping you and ask you. They don't have to wait for me if it's something you know, or their manager if it's something simple or they have a question they're too embarrassed to ask, or they just want to talk. They're frustrated about something and they need somebody to reach out to. Either the manager who's hired them will either know their temperament and can know who would be a good buddy, or you ask on the team hey, who'd like to be this person's buddy? This is kind of what I sense of them and get somebody to volunteer. And then, when that person comes in, you tell them look, so-and-so's your buddy. They're not your manager, a peer, they're the person you go to when you have a quick question or you just need somebody external to talk to. You don't want to go to your manager, you don't want to go to me. It's not something where you have to go to HR, but it's just like hey, can I talk to you? I need to know something or I want to get something off my chest or whatever, and so that's set up beforehand and you ask those people to kind of meet in the first week and then set up their own rhythm. Do they have regular conversations, or just hey, reach out when you need me With the manager, the person they're reporting to you.

Cheryl Rodness: 15:52

Make it very clear you are to have structured meetings with this individual. You have to have weekly one-on-ones with them. You've got to go through the work, you've got to take the time to evaluate it. You have to give them good, constructive feedback on what they're doing and give them the time that they need. And then you also let them know that they should be invited. That person should be invited to all your team calls. Get them added onto the calendar. If I'm doing all hands, if this person doesn't report to me and I'm doing an all hands call with my team, I invite that individual. Make them feel welcome.

Cheryl Rodness: 16:20

The hardest part is when you are a virtual company, as I typically am and my teams typically are. You need that student to be able to make the connection and you need to make them feel that being remote is still a professional job, right? You can't be in your dorm room with you know, your bed unmade, or roommate coming in and out of your dorm room or coming in the bathroom. You laugh. But during the pandemic I actually had to give etiquette lessons to our cohort. Hey guys, I know it's the pandemic, but shirts on no, tank tops. Women, your bed needs to be made. Your doors should be closed. I don't want to see what's going on in the hall. If you're at home or in the dorm and you're working and you're on a call, have a little sign made up that says hey, I'm on a business call, be professional. I laugh. But I had to teach some basic etiquette because they never had experiences, they've never worked remote and it's a pandemic where everybody is super casual.

Kevin Kerner: 17:19

Anyway, yeah, and they just may not have the context of what a real business is right, so giving them that advice early on is really super valuable. For the mentors, though, do they need their own set of training? Have you seen ways to get them more engaged? Do they have to raise their hand as mentors? Do they have to want to do it as well?

Cheryl Rodness: 17:40

It's a bit of both. You never volunteer or I've never voluntold anybody. I've typically gone to someone and said I'd like you to be so-and-so's mentor, coming in, and they typically don't say no. But you need to be mindful of who you're setting up. There are people in your organization that you know would be a good mentor, or a buddy, so to speak, and those who might not necessarily give somebody the time or whatever doesn't have the right temperament to do it. So you've got to match it appropriately and typically you'll find especially if you find somebody who's been out of school for maybe two or three years they remember what it was like coming in and they'll go. Of course I'll give them the help and support they need. I remember what that was like and I you know how it can be scary or intimidating or just unknown and they want to help.

Kevin Kerner: 18:30

Yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense and I love the idea of these checkpoints that you mentioned along the way, and even checkpoints with the CXO team. That's really valuable because it gives them face time with the senior people at the company.

Cheryl Rodness: 18:45

Now you have to prep them.

Kevin Kerner: 18:46

Yeah.

Cheryl Rodness: 18:47

You don't want to send them in blind, so I would always take the time to go through. What should the conversation be covered? If you've got the time with them, what are the kinds of things that you should be asking them? If you're going to prepare materials, let's go through it ahead of time. Let's focus on what the key points should be, because you don't want to waste the CXO's time either, or the head of the department or whoever. You need to make sure that the time is valuable and as seen as valuable.

Kevin Kerner: 19:13

And me having to meet with HR is really useful too, because that's another department that they're going to have to could potentially have to deal with at the company. So CXO HR super interesting. So when you get to evaluation and feedback, you mentioned that it needs to be relatively structured. What about hard skills versus soft skills? Like you might have people that are really good at their job but didn't have any soft skills, or vice versa.

Cheryl Rodness: 19:36

That all gets built into the four box. So if you think about the four box, you're looking at skills and performance, and that performance often comes down to a lot of soft skills, Like were they able to interact? How did other people feel about them? Now, depending as you go to build your four box or put your person in the four box, what a lot of us did is sent out surveys to the people that they interacted with. A very quick survey. They just got a quick overview of what was it like to work with this person Efficient, did they use your time well? Did they ask good questions? Did they work well with the team, et cetera. Whatever the questions are that you need to ask, but that gives you a better sense from the constituents that they worked with. How did they perform? And then you take that back with your own feedback and then the manager puts them in the four box.

Kevin Kerner: 20:19

Have you ever seen an intern that just blows you away at a project where you're like, oh my gosh, this person is a genius, we have to hire this. This is amazing.

Cheryl Rodness: 20:28

Yeah, I've hired a couple of my interns. In fact, I hired one intern who was the son of a very good friend. His qualifications were perfect, exactly what I needed, so it was the right person and brought him in for an internship. What we typically did was they were brought in for a summer internship. If you liked them and they were performing well, you would ask them, or they would ask you. Do you connect? Send this through some hours during the school year. Students can always find time for a few hours and if you liked them and thought they were worthwhile, you would say yes. And then, as they came up to graduation, you kind of started having conversations Can I hire them With this individual? Hired them during the summer, kept them through two semesters, going back part-time, and then talked to them about a full-time job. And they're there. It's probably three years later.

Kevin Kerner: 21:22

Yeah, super interesting.

Cheryl Rodness: 21:23

I've done that with a few people.

Kevin Kerner: 21:24

Yeah, I mean that's what we're doing with Audrey. This intern is. She's so good. We were like, well, we're just going to keep her going through the semester and typically the young adult wants the work. But it's like perfect, because they slowly get integrated into your company to the point where they can actually do the work really well.

Cheryl Rodness: 21:40

And that's the nail on the head. If you do this properly and you find that diamond in the rough and you keep them through their academic program, you help them because what they learn they take back into their classes and they have real world examples and experience. They make some money, you get some work done and then by the time that they're ready to come out of school they know your company. The onboarding and the ramp is really minimal. They can become productive immediately and they've got a job and you've got somebody waiting for you.

Kevin Kerner: 22:08

If you just off top of your head, like the best interns, what makes them stand out, what makes them become, can't miss hires.

Cheryl Rodness: 22:16

Hunger and aspiration. They ask for more. They do what they need to do. They do it well. They do it independently. They come back with ideas. They're self-sufficient, like they know what they need to do, much like they would in school. They take the understanding of what you need them to do and they run with it. And then they have aspiration and such that they think of the next thing hey, could we be doing this? Hey, have you thought about that? Whether or not it's a good idea or not doesn't matter. It's their thinking about what can we do? That's going to help advance the business goals.

Kevin Kerner: 22:46

How do you measure, or should you measure, the ROI in some meaningful way for the business?

Cheryl Rodness: 22:53

We always measure it in terms of did the projects that we laid out to be done get done, and did that alleviate the bandwidth of others on the team to do other work that was probably better to their skill set and they didn't have the time to do previously? And that's how we would measure it. Was the person effective? Did they get the work done that we needed to get done? Did it allow the other members of the team to do other work?

Kevin Kerner: 23:20

Paid or free internships.

Cheryl Rodness: 23:21

I don't think it's fair to ask kids to work for free, would you?

Kevin Kerner: 23:25

I agree, I totally agree, and we're a small company and I wouldn't ask anyone to work for free. Yeah, it just sort of sets up a bad feeling, I guess, between parties.

Cheryl Rodness: 23:36

It does, and this is a discussion for another podcast but the loyalty or the commitment that this generation coming out of school has towards companies is very different than probably what you and I have, kevin. And so if you're not going to treat them right, why should they treat you right? Right, so they'll take more days off, they'll be less committed. I'm not getting paid for this anyway. What's it really matter? Now, some will have a much harder work ethic and that won't matter to them. It's all the experience. But I just don't feel it's fair to ask people to work and not pay them for it.

Kevin Kerner: 24:09

Would you hire someone from out of college, after college high school degree Like does it matter?

Cheryl Rodness: 24:17

Hiring full-time.

Kevin Kerner: 24:19

No, no, not hire, but intern.

Cheryl Rodness: 24:21

Yeah okay so personal preference versus what's been done. My preference, where I have found the greatest success, is to hire interns who are at least sophomores they have. They're in the second year of university, they have a little bit more maturity, a little bit more discipline, a little bit more knowledge from the courses they've taken and can connect the dots better. Having said that, I've had other interns who were freshmen, or a couple at a high school. Again, you have to adjust the work expectation.

Kevin Kerner: 24:58

Really good advice. Like I wouldn't have thought the sophomore, but I think you're dead on. I think that seems about right.

Cheryl Rodness: 25:03

I've had enough experience to tell you that a sophomore is going to be good, A junior is better. You know sort of a rising senior is great, but they tend to also have more choices.

Kevin Kerner: 25:16

And then I had one other sort of fast question for you, because we find a lot of great talent in Central and South America. Global, okay, or should you keep it local, to the company, the region that you're in, or would you hire globally for any internship? I mean, what are the nuances? You've been at some massive companies, so I wonder what your perspective is there.

Cheryl Rodness: 25:36

In terms of region, the interesting thing is, if you're going to pay them, they actually have to be in a region where you have an office. Because of the finance issues and the legal issues of it all, I think they have to maybe not so much legal, but financially. You can't pay them from the US if they're in Central America or if they're in Japan, or if they're in India or somewhere else. It's really difficult. So you want to hire them for the region in which the work is being done and the manager is located. Time zones matter.

Kevin Kerner: 26:07

Yeah, yeah. Especially if you're a young person and someone's across the world and you're working days and their night, it just does not seem like a great fit. Great, okay, this is great advice. If I'm a marketing leader that wants to start building an internship program tomorrow, where would I start? What would be the first few things you'd start with? Where would I start?

Cheryl Rodness: 26:29

What would be the first few things you'd start with Sit down with your team and understand what work really needs to get done and can get done by somebody else no-transcript and then really define what those jobs are, what the projects are, what the outcomes are, the deliverables, and be realistic of what can be done within 10, 12 weeks. I also wouldn't do it in less than really 10 weeks.

Kevin Kerner: 27:08

Yeah, good advice. So 10 weeks, you think, is like the minimum.

Cheryl Rodness: 27:14

Yeah, we've had people for eight weeks, which you can do, but again you have to adjust what can be done because your first couple of weeks are going to be them floundering and finding their way around.

Kevin Kerner: 27:24

You know it's interesting too for your team. I hadn't thought of this, but we preach this a lot at Mighty and True about building systems and automation and repeatability and standard operating procedures to scale and you've been at bigger companies so they probably had a lot more scale. But if you're forcing yourself to go through the process of hiring an intern and really going through that, you really have to have systems that you can show them to work on things. You can't just like drop them in and say, hey, figure this, you can tell them, figure this out. But you could tell them figure out how to build a system for you, which I did with my intern. But it really gets your company thinking about like, how do we repeat the things that we do?

Cheryl Rodness: 28:03

Playbooks are really, really important. We have a ton of them at Quest Global, across the marketing organization. Every time we do something new, create something new. We create a playbook of how do you do this, how do you execute on this type of program or activity, or deliverable or whatever, because you do need to point people to playbooks.

Kevin Kerner: 28:25

There's a lot of companies that don't have that same bias. So if you're a company that doesn't have any playbooks and you're just, it's all done by you know everyone's sort of tribal knowledge, it seems like it'd be a lot harder to have someone younger in.

Cheryl Rodness: 28:39

But then you can actually ask them to document and create the playbook for you. Yeah, yeah, good point, if you don't have one, you're saying go ahead and do this, let them document what they're doing, because they're learning it for the first time and their documentation will be pretty thorough.

Kevin Kerner: 28:53

Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the future. So the future of everything right now is AI. How do you think internships will evolve as AI reshapes? Early career work Is there any effect that AI has on this stuff?

Cheryl Rodness: 29:07

Well, again, if we're talking about marketing for sure, I had a summer intern and I had her using AI. I had her working on copy, on scripts, on PR releases, and I said to her, I'm going to walk you through our system, which is it's an intake, where you sit down with the expert, the SME, and ask a series of questions and get the input. And then I want you to, so I want you to go through that and understand what an intake session looks like. And then you're going to take the input and you're going to put it into AI and you're going to ask it to create a press release or a script or whatever it was that we were doing. And then I want you to read it, make sure it makes sense, massage it and then bring it back to me and we can take a look at. You know how we execute on this. The biggest mistake people make is that they feed it into AI and go okay, I'm done now.

Kevin Kerner: 29:58

Yeah.

Cheryl Rodness: 29:58

Oh, if I take out the em dashes, it looks like I wrote it. No, they're going to have to use AI. We all need to use AI. I think it's a brilliant tool, but I call it first draft. Ai is a first draft capability from a marketing standpoint. It saves time because it allows you to get the basics behind you, but if you don't have somebody looking at it, reading it, for readability, for context, for impact, for all the things that we need, relevant emotive distinctive makes sense that it's coming from your company. The quotes make sense. Proven emotive distinctive makes sense that it's coming from your company. The quotes make sense. They're in the tone of voice from your people, the tone of voice of the release, the script, whatever it is, then you're dead in the water.

Kevin Kerner: 30:44

There's no sense using it. So it's a great way to start first draft. Yeah, I totally completely agree. And what's an amazing scenario for a young person in an internship is it seems like using AI and with deep research and things, they can get the information so much faster and they can talk to AI to get what they need to get something done, where before AI it would have been a lot of Googling and research and things they would have had to do on their own. So it seems like it speeds the outcome to that first draft for them. But I agree, they do need someone with some context that has that can review things. We had a lot of AI output from our intern this semester this summer and it was great. But you know, having done this for close to 40 years now, I'm like, okay, well, that's it needs. It needs a lot of massaging, but isn't it now that, like if you're a intern, you may be able to dig into stuff that you wouldn't have been able to dig into before, just because you have this amazing coworker tool?

Cheryl Rodness: 31:43

I agree, and I think it gives you exposure to do things, because AI allows you to get ahead of it. So if you're not a great writer, it gives you a way to start and then you can read through it and figure a better way to massage it. But I can't stress enough how important it is to read what's coming out of AI. I'm going to give you an example. I was working on an email for something, for a project, and it was going to and it was going to a potential client and it was just taking.

Cheryl Rodness: 32:19

I had pulled some information about their quarterly earnings and the email that came back dear so-and-so congratulations on an amazing quarter. And I looked at it and went wait a minute, I don't think they had an amazing quarter. When I take a look at the financials, well, the amazing quarter was they went from losing like 14, you know negative 14 the previous quarter to negative six or something like that this quarter. You know AI looked at it as an amazing quarter. I'm like whoa, congratulations on only being down 6%. So again I caution don't take AI you know it's a first blush without so true, it's just so true.

Kevin Kerner: 32:58

And I would wonder like, okay, well, fast forward a couple more years, two, three more years. You're going to have whatever Gen Z and Gen Alpha in internships. They're going to have a whole different like look on working, I guess than what it is now, but they're also going to be very AI native in everything that they do. So it's going to get better.

Cheryl Rodness: 33:16

AI native and social media native. The social media landscape and the platforms change so frequently now. What was in six months ago is now out. What's the new format? What's the new trend? If you need somebody who's on top of that, because, I hate to say it you and I aren't.

Kevin Kerner: 33:32

Yeah.

Cheryl Rodness: 33:32

Probably not.

Kevin Kerner: 33:33

Yeah, no, no. I gave Audrey a few things for social media and it was so much better than anything I could have done I would have never thought of how she did. The other thing I think is good too is field marketing and events. I think internships are because events are so logical in how you put them together. You got to kind of see around the corners of things. That can go wrong and a lot can go wrong, but it is a lot of sort of critical thinking that I think is really good for interns to do.

Cheryl Rodness: 33:58

Yeah, the detail required behind an event is actually really good for them to understand discipline. The challenge I would say with some interns is they may not have necessarily the sense of style or finesse that you may be looking for, so you always need to kind of look over the shoulder a little bit.

Kevin Kerner: 34:14

Clearly Well, this has been great. I mean, I think we've gone through just about everything onboarding, mentorship I've taken a ton of notes evaluation, hiring, roi really good stuff. I have one last thing I do with my guests here, which is called AI Roulette, and it's basically I load the questions I was going to ask in your profile into Perplexity and then I hit Go and it gives me a question and typically the Roulette questions are the best questions of all because my questions suck so bad. So let me hit Send here and let's see what it does. This is interesting. Okay, it says Under what circumstances would you trust AI to entirely pick your interns?

Cheryl Rodness: 34:59

Circumstances. I really have to think about this. I could come up with the reallys. That's okay.

Kevin Kerner: 35:06

I know what my answer would be.

Cheryl Rodness: 35:10

Planning a three-year-old birthday party? Yeah right.

Kevin Kerner: 35:14

Yeah, if you were just doing the bare minimum, that would be it.

Cheryl Rodness: 35:20

I don't know. I don't know what I would trust AI to do 100% From a work perspective, nothing From a personal perspective. They can plan a dinner party and recipes for me.

Kevin Kerner: 35:31

That is dead on. That's exactly what I was thinking. I was like not much, I would maybe manage my calendar, I guess. And that just shows you the confidence we have in AI right.

Cheryl Rodness: 35:43

Exactly, yeah, they can plan my dinner. If dinner's no good, I can toss it out.

Kevin Kerner: 35:46

Yeah right.

Cheryl Rodness: 35:47

No harm, no foul.

Kevin Kerner: 35:48

Good question, perplexity. But no, we would not, we're not going to trust it.

Kevin Kerner: 35:52

You know, I saw something today. I was just reading about how candidates don't trust that AI can pick them as the right candidate. So all these young college graduates there's a bunch of AI systems that are now trying to pick them as a candidate. They're sifting through all the resumes that companies get. Like 60 or 70% don't believe the AI is picking them right, but get. And like 60 or 70% don't believe the AI is picking them right, but at the same time, like almost 60 to 70%, are using AI to write their resumes and cover letters and all those things. It's kind of like the battle of the two AIs when it comes to hiring these days.

Cheryl Rodness: 36:27

I would agree. I think HR in many cases not in all rely too much on AI to sift through resumes because they're putting in keywords and they could be missing lots of keywords. I also know of students who are writing multiple resumes and sending them through to a company to see which word gets picked up. So I don't know if that's just a waste of time and overflow into an inbox for resumes, to be perfectly honest, and there's nothing. When you're hiring somebody, you have to talk to them, you have to get a sense of who they are. I don't think you can sift through by looking at keywords. You're going to miss people. You're going to miss a potential diamond in the rough or a real jewel because their keywords didn't match.

Kevin Kerner: 37:12

It's also forcing a lot more in-person interviews too, cause you have, and you know, if the person's not remote or if you're not remote, you're actually want to meet the person, cause there's just so much, so much out there. That's pretty crazy. This is really great. My next internship. I have a lot of work to do to make it, to make it better.

Cheryl Rodness: 37:30

I can help you.

Kevin Kerner: 37:31

Yeah, yeah, I will definitely be calling you in the spring next year, because we'll do it again. It was a great experience. It's just so fun to see these young people. Okay, spring is too late.

Cheryl Rodness: 37:41

That's the other thing, yep. So if you want your pick of students, you should have your resumes up and ready to go by December.

Kevin Kerner: 37:49

Yeah, I guess you're right. Students are already well into looking in January.

Cheryl Rodness: 37:52

Yeah, if you're waiting till April or May. I hate to say it, but you're getting people who haven't been able to get an internship or were too late and too lazy to start looking early, or have been turned down by other places. Not that I mean to generalize to students, but I have found that when you wait too late, you're not necessarily getting your choice.

Kevin Kerner: 38:12

Yeah, that's a good ending advice. Really good stuff. Cheryl, this has been amazing. I know people want to reach out to you and talk to you some of this stuff and I know you're also very busy at Quest too, on the brand side, but how can people reach you if they want to get ahold of you to talk to you about any of your knowledge around internships?

Cheryl Rodness: 38:30

You can find me on LinkedIn. It's Cheryl Rodness. You can certainly reach out to me at Cheryl Rodness at quest-globalcom, I'm easy to find.

Kevin Kerner: 38:39

Cool, I'll link you.

Cheryl Rodness: 38:40

I'm happy to talk to people about this. I love this topic.

Kevin Kerner: 38:42

Yeah, I know You're great. You've always been a great sort of teacher and mentor for me, so I do appreciate our friendship.

Cheryl Rodness: 38:55

Thanks so much for coming on the podcast here and putting up with me and I hope to see you again soon. Thanks, kevin, it was a pleasure, a lot of fun. Okay, I'll see you, take care.

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