Oriana B has worked with Twin Group since the summer of 2022 and we are about to welcome our third intern from the programme. We are an Irish e-commerce business based in Dublin who sell Furniture and Homewares. Our internship is focused on digital marketing where we offer interns the opportunity to work in a real e-commerce business for 3 months. Our strong online presence makes it easier for candidates to research our business before they apply and check if your business interests them.
Twin publishes our intern job specification and then sends us CV’s of interested candidates. If we see a match, we will conduct a remote interview over Zoom. This is a good opportunity for both our management team and the candidate to find out if there is a cultural fit and to make sure that we can offer something meaningful in terms of work experience for the candidate. Our Managing Director and Creative Director conduct the interview for Oriana B which means that we can make a decision quickly. It’s really important to interview candidates and understand their aspirations for their internship as we need to be able to provide them with experience that will enhance their career.
As an e-commerce business in the furniture and homewares sector, our internship is very much about digital marketing and promoting our products to our customers. Digital Marketing is a broad discipline and it allows candidates to choose areas that interest them most. For example, our first intern was interested in social media and marketing operations whereas our second intern was more interested in brand development. We are currently waiting to start with our third candidate who has a strong preference for video production. All of these sub disciplines fit well into the overall discipline of Digital Marketing and having some flexibility is important to maximise the skills of the candidate with the needs of the organisation.
We really want our interns to come away from their time with us with valuable, measurable experience. After all, it’s important that they can take the experience of working with Oriana B and use it for the development of their own careers. This works best if we align our business objectives with those of the intern. This sounds obvious but in practice, it takes a little time and patience to get it right. With only 3 months to work with someone, we need to get them up to speed with our brand and how we work quickly. This starts during the interview process when we find out what most interests the intern and continues when they arrive and we can do a company induction with them and develop KPI’s for their internship.
We aim to have KPI’s set up within the first 1-2 weeks of the intern arriving. Setting KPI’s is really important for us and for the intern. It means we can provide meaningful feedback on the work produced and it also means that the candidate has something tangible to write on their CV at the end of the programme. For example in social media, it could be the growth of a followers on a particular platform or for brand, it’s could be the correct application of our logo in marketing materials or the production of a certain number of on brand blogs. At the half way point and end of the programme, Twin require us to complete an assessment on the intern’s progress. Having the KPI’s allow us to do that easily giving us the clear information that we need to report back on progress.
So what does success look like?
Our first intern used the experience and achievements she gained from working with Oriana B to immediately secure a role in digital marketing. During her time, she had focused on the development of social media and marketing operations which meant she had some good achievements for her CV that she could talk about in the interview process for permanent jobs. The fact that she joined a completely different industry was a real testament to how valuable the experience had been as she had learned some good transferrable skills.
Our second intern enjoyed the experience of working with Oriana B so much that we ultimately offered her a permanent role as our Marketing Assistant. She really excelled in managing brand and developing written content such as blogs and customer facing product information. We are eagerly awaiting our new intern who brings with him a wealth of enthusiasm and skills in videography which we are hoping to use for more on-site video content, development of our social media channels and in depth product reviews. It’s an exciting time!
We are very proud to have partnered with Twin Employment for several years and look forward to being able to give more young people a first work experience in digital marketing.
For more information about about the programme go to Twin Employment.
