Funeral directors are busy people with a large to-do list. When there isn’t enough time in the day to complete tasks such as posting to Facebook, an intern can help. Hiring an intern can help your funeral home increase productivity and become more established in your community. It also provides you with a fresh perspective from a mind learning the latest trends.

Let’s further discuss the benefits of interns for both your funeral home and community.

Why Interns Are Beneficial

Internships not only provide students with work experience, they provide your funeral home with extra help completing necessary tasks. Whether it’s helping complete time-consuming tasks, or little tasks that you don’t have time to complete. And it’s all at little to no cost for your funeral home.

It also makes your funeral home more well-known and trusted in your community. Your interns will help spread the word about your internship and your funeral home to your community, providing positive feedback. The more your funeral home’s name is put out there, the more possible client families you may find.

Plus, there’s the possibility of an internship turning into a new full-time position for your funeral home. Or, you can keep the position open to just interns as a semester-long, year-long, or summer internship. Either way, it helps your funeral home conquer its work load.

How to Find an Intern

Whether you’re looking to hire a high school or college student, there are several ways to go about finding an intern. You can start by posting the position on your social media pages and job search sites like Indeed. You also can create a LinkedIn job posting. Just make sure to lay out some details about the position and specify it as an internship. You can have them fill out an application or contact someone at your funeral home to apply for it.

You also can reach out to your local high schools, colleges, and even your client families. They most likely know some internship-seeking students or have children of their own interested in the internship opportunity.

Internship Ideas

A student interested in the funeral profession can shadow one of your staff members. For example, this college student interested in being a medical examiner or forensics pathologist gained work experience at a local funeral home. However, your internship doesn’t have to be just mortuary science-related.

There are many internship ideas, such as:

• A Social Media Intern
  Whether your funeral home has multiple social media pages or just Facebook, an intern can help engage with your followers. This can be through making posts, responding to comments, and other tasks.
• A Photographer Intern
  An intern can take photos for your blog posts, website, or another project. They also can take photos at your events so your staff can focus on your guests.
• A Marketing Intern
  A student studying marketing or public relations can develop a promotion plan. They also can find ways to reach your community, like social media, print ads, event attendance, and more.
• An Event Coordinator Intern
  It takes a lot of planning to create a successful event. An intern can be a huge help for organizing events. For example, you can hire a fall semester intern to help plan your holiday remembrance program.
• A Writer Intern
  An intern can write several different pieces, such as blog posts, press releases, or other projects. They can even share their blog posts on your funeral home’s social media.
• An Accounting Intern
  A student studying accounting or financing can help create a budget and analyze your current expenses. This provides you with an outside perspective and provides the intern with beneficial work experience.
• A Research Intern
  A research intern is a great asset for your funeral home because there’s a variety of projects ideas. For example, they can survey your community to determine your target audience and what people want from funerals.

Important Things to Remember

If you decide to hire an intern, make sure you have time to mentor and supervise them. It may be a good idea to designate someone as their mentor and go-to person if they have questions. You also should have some clear goals you want to achieve from the internship. What tasks do you want them to complete? What does your funeral home want to learn from this experience? These are some good starting questions.

It’s also important to consider the skills your intern will gain, as many interns are doing work to gain experience in their chosen field before they begin a job search. Some may even want to use their internship for college credits, in which case you will often need to sign off on a few forms.

Does your funeral home have an internship program? Share your advice in the comments below!