Marketing Intern

The answer to this question reveals the candidate's motivations for pursuing this internship position. It's vital to understand what is motivating your applicants so you can determine if they are in for the long haul.

☛ What motivates them to interview for the company

☛ What they plan to learn as an intern

☛ Growth potential

I find that your company is innovative and values continuous learning, and my goal is to work in a forward-thinking company. Companies that consistently innovate often lead in their industries and constantly grow. I value continuous learning and want to grow as a prolific business leader with an innovator. I believe your company and this position can help me to achieve this.

► Mediocre Responses:

☛ I write my blog post in Word and then post it when it’s ready.

► Great Responses:

☛ I write my blog post in Word, add hyperlinks to at least three other pieces of content on our site that we’ve published, and add at least one hyperlink to a third party resource.

☛ I ensure there’s an associated featured image for the post by going to a stock image site.

☛ I always make sure there’s a clear call to action at the end of each post.

☛ For quality control, I make sure at least one other person has proofread it before publishing.

☛ I optimize the title for a target keyword by looking at what terms people are searching for in Google.

The answer to this question demonstrates if your candidate has potential to work for your company long-term. It's crucial to identify this because you are investing resources in the candidate and can save time hiring candidates who are already trained for the position.

☛ Potential for continued work at the company

☛ Application of learned skills

☛ Where and how skills will be applied

After this internship, I plan to complete my final semester in college and apply leadership, project management, communication and technical skills that I'll gain in my academic, volunteer and extracurricular activities. My plans after graduation include pursuing a career as a business analyst for your company.

☛ Why it’s important to ask this: What drives a person to invest their time and effort into creating content? Is it anecdotal insight such as a hallway conversation with a sales person—which may be a good place to begin investigating an idea, but not the final driver for its execution? Or is creation more data-driven, such as through Google Analytics or insight from a content marketing platform?

☛ What to look out for: Be wary if your candidate indicates their past content development was primarily driven by what their boss told them to write about; or they have no understanding of what goes into content strategy. A follow-up question could be: “Describe your company’s content strategy, including key steps in its development.”

Interviewers usually pose this question because they may be interested in knowing how serious you are in pursuing a given academic or professional field. In an internship context, this question should compel you to dig down and think about your career interests in the long term: Are you planning to go back to graduate school? Are you interested in gaining a few years of actual real-world experience? Would you like to work as a full-time staff member of an organization similar to the one you are applying for? There is no “right answer” but you do have to provide one that is insightful in that you have a plan to keep building your professional skills after your internship. Who knows, maybe your organization would like to know if you would be available for a permanent position after you complete your internship. And in that case, how you answer this becomes all the more important.

The answer to this question reveals what your candidates expect to get out of this position and what they think the work will involve. This provides insight into whether you can fulfill the interviewee's expectations so that neither of you wastes time.

☛ Realistic goals

☛ Goals the candidate expects to achieve

☛ Whether goals align with tasks candidate is expected to accomplish

My expectations involve being able to learn how to identify business problems, how to choose strategies to address these issues, and how to plan and execute the tactics needed to achieve these goals. By learning this, I can gain real-world experience of what it takes to drive business operations forward.

This one places the focus on the employer. Chances are you have applied for internships at other organisations too – the interviewers suspect this and want to gauge how serious you are about their opportunity and how likely you are to take it up if they offer it to you (so they won’t have to go through the interview process again with someone else).

Your reasons need to show that you have looked into the company beyond a quick read of the ‘about us’ section on its website and that you and the employer are a good match. What do they specialise in and how does it relate to your career aims or career interests? What are they striving to achieve and how does this relate to your own values? Always back up claims about your own values with evidence. For example, you might want to draw a link between the company’s aim to improve lives through its healthcare technology and your desire to help improve lives through your work. A credible answer would give an example of how you have pursued this passion/interest already, such as volunteering or charity work.