Let’s be honest, whether you just hired your first intern or are running an ongoing internship program, you’re probably a little bit nervous that your new student employees are going to be tough to manage and a potential for distraction.

This is one of the primary concerns faced by those who hire interns, and while some resolve this discomfort by assigning work so easy it requires no management at all (from filing papers to made-up projects) this approach assures your program will be a waste of time for all involved.

If you develop a process to effectively manage your interns, everyone will get more value from the program and you’ll do a better job of converting your interns into full-time employees.

Today and tomorrow, Promotional Consultant Today shares these 10 tips for intern management.

1. Should I even have an internship program? Before deciding whether or not to hire interns, all companies need to talk internally and make sure you are recruiting students for the right reasons. Do you have certain short-term projects where a student could be an asset? Do you hire a lot of college students and can you convert some of your most proven interns into hires? Ultimately you need to have a goal in mind as you go about hiring inters, because even as a temporary role, this is a big commitment.

2. Assign the intern a single manager, who enjoys working with students. This is huge. Students can accomplish big goals when given the right amount of guidance. But, they are new to the work world and your industry, and so if thrown out to sea and told to start paddling they won’t know what your expectations are or where to start. Ultimately, you want to find someone on your staff who enjoys sharing his or her expertise with young people, and is going to be committed to helping the interns.

3. Make sure the intern has a dedicated project. How many projects have you had sitting on the back burner without the proper bandwidth to do the job right? Assigning an intern to an overarching internship project helps them learn more quickly, keeps them focused, helps you evaluate their contribution and means that they can provide a final project that adds a lot of value to your company. One expert tip we advise is to assign a smaller, more manageable project at the onset of the internship to help you gauge the intern’s strengths and weaknesses.

4. Meet for coffee once a week. This is a simple task that can make managing your interns much more efficient. By meeting for a casual 30-minute to one-hour conversation every week, you can assign objectives, answer questions and help your interns move forward in their projects with confidence.

5. Set quantifiable weekly goals for the intern. This is a management best practice and is extra important for interns. Interns need to have clear project goals and you need regular benchmarks to see how they are performing in order to help them improve.

Need more intern management tips? Read tomorrow’s PCT.

Source: Nathan Parcells is VP of marketing and co-founder of Looksharp. He has spent the past decade helping students launch their career, researching best practices for hiring Millennials (including running Looksharp’s annual “State of College Hiring”) and sharing these insights with employers. Parcells’ work has been featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, Business Insider and more. Outside of work, he is an avid rock climber, back packer and Bob Dylan fan.