HRM - Final Report 

A report submitted to

Prof. Kunal Kumar

In partial fulfilment of the requirements of the course

Human Resource Management

By:

Group B12

Vansh Kumar (2011268)

Kothale Shubham Sanjay (2011306)
Ashutosh Dekatey (2011297)
Pulkita Singh (2011181)
Shakthivel V (2011266)
Harsha Dugar (2011330)

On

05-04-2021
 An Experience of Three Interns(Idiots)

“Hum to Interns hain sahib, jhola leke chal padenge”- Interns

The season for summer internships was here. After a hectic first year, enthu cutlets from top
rung B-schools were looking for applying their globe skills in the actual corporate world.
After all they had to fight their way through a rigorous screening process.

ABC Constructions Ltd (Typical) visited top B-schools in the country and after a rigorous
interview process recruited three people from three different colleges for the summer
internship. The firm is based out of Delhi and currently working on a multi-million dollar
project in Mumbai. 

The company usually has a specific requirement which they expect the interns to fulfil, or
they expect an intern to perform additional tasks which if a full-time employee is excused
from, so that full-time employee could focus on other priority tasks. The company is looking
for a fresh perspective on their status quo of business, and it gives the company enough time
to gauge the candidate, whether he is fit for roles in the company or not. So, it forms the
foundation for job analysis, although the company did not pay much emphasis on preparing
the job description and job specification for the interns.

The real estate sector took a serious hit during the pandemic and the company had high
expectations from these interns to come up with a new strategy to attain sustainable growth
through this project. The shortlisted candidates had relevant work experience as two of them
were civil engineers and one was an architect. None of them were from Mumbai but given
their common background they were still able to coordinate well and gel up easily. Given the
importance of the project, the company emphasized on recruiting students having sound
knowledge about the industry.

Despite the assurance from the HR manager, Vansh, about the recruitment process and the
need for interns for a fresh perspective on the project, for the company to promote the
company's vision and cultural values and maintaining good relations with the colleges from
a future hiring perspective, department leader Shubham was highly sceptical about the
abilities of the candidates and was apprehensive in assigning this new project to them.
Shubham was constantly worried about the progress of the project and agreed to give only
trivial work to the interns, just for the sake of giving them some work.

The interns were only communicated about the project title and location at the time of hiring
but were not informed about what the project would entail.  Initially the job description
required them to work on the project site but later they were sent to the marketing office in
Delhi rather than the project site in Mumbai.  The interns were in for a rude shock when they
got to know that they had to report to the marketing office in Delhi. They were expecting to
work on the new high-profile field project in Mumbai that they were informed during the
interview. (The entire purpose of hiring interns who had experience in this domain went in
vain as they could not use their past experience they were expecting to use during the
internship). Harsha was initially very excited at the prospect of getting to shop at the Fashion
Street and the Colaba street market but all her dreams came crashing down when Pulkita told
her that they had to join in Delhi. 

 All the three interns arrived at the Mumbai office, expecting a warm welcome from the
company, but to their surprise, forget about a proper orientation, they were made to sit in the
office reception for five to six hours without any instructions/guidance from the company’s
side on what to do or whom to report to. This made Pulkita question the HR about the neglect
shown towards them, in response, the HR manager subtly made some excuse and let the issue
settle. In reality the HR had delegated the task of orientation of the interns to his junior, the
junior employee, already overburdened with tasks took up the responsibility from his senior,
but was not able to manage his time well. The junior gave the interns less priority resulting in
a five to six hour delay of the entire process, causing the entire problem. 
Later, the junior HR employee clueless about what to do with the interns and who they were
to report to, just gave them a quick office tour and asked them to come back the next day.
The entire duration of the internship was very weird for the students as everything was
confusing and dull and they were not as involved as they thought they would be. Harsha even
contemplated applying for the role of office boy who added more value to the firm.

The project’s actual requirements were of 1 civil engineer and 1 architect, but since the Job
description was not prepared in advance, they could not analyse the job specification and
instead hired an additional intern, who was of limited use to the company.  The HR Manager
in a dilemma was thinking - “It would be legal but not ethical for the company to let go of the
third intern. In which case, we have to make the judgement of retaining one of the two civil
engineers without having known their working capabilities in person, if the interns are about
to begin work. Or, based on performance indicators, it would make sense to remove the intern
who is not able to perform upto the expectations of the firm, but that would take a while for
us to evaluate. The company did not have a standard procedure to measure the performance
of the interns and thus would be difficult to evaluate them on this basis.

If the company decides to keep the third intern, then the work which could be feasibly
divided, could be divided amongst the three interns, and the timeline for the project would
thus reduce compared to the scenario where only two interns worked on the project. If the
work is not divisible, and only two interns are required to work on the project, then the third
intern could assume a spectrum of roles. He/she could analyze the work done on the project
by the two interns, and critically evaluate the project. The roles could further be alternated, if
the project is divided into phases, thus giving everyone the opportunity to both work on the
project, and analyze it from a third person perspective. Also, the third intern, could assist a
senior management professional in a managerial capacity, thus giving the third intern,
valuable business experience as well. 
So, the HRs decided to keep all the three interns as it was a last minute decision and they
could not do much about it. In the coming days, most of the time, one of the two civil
engineers had no work to do and had to sit idle the entire day.
Since, there were no visits to the project site, as it was in a completely different city, the
interns were given the job of re-evaluating the project proposal report and to try and reiterate
the financial calculations to further increase the return on investment. Given that it was not
entirely a technical project and that it involved a few of the financial aspects they had studied,
the interns weren’t entirely pleased with the job assigned. Across the two month period, they
were only given an initial debrief on the expectation levied on them but were not guided by
the senior staff or the pre-assigned mentors. Since, the job assigned was just to revise an
already approved project report, the interns were sceptical on the evaluation criteria during
the internship. Neither were the interns allowed to visit the site, nor were they involved in the
live project as they had expected. The estimated project length was over 4 years, and the
interns were sceptical on how they will be judged about their input to the project, given that
they will only be involved for a marginal amount of time, especially in the planning phase
and not during the implementation phase. With no scope for any methods to evaluate their
efforts, the interns started to slack a little on the effort put into the work, as they were beyond
convinced that the evaluation process would be uniform, and that there would be no apparent
changes to any of their evaluations. The interns would take longer breaks, arrive late and
leave early, and started showing lesser dedication towards the tasks in hand.

Harsha and Pulkita during a tea break were sitting in the office canteen sipping coffee and
talking about work. Harsha being from Bangalore talked about how her other friends had got
an internship in Bangalore itself and were being paid transportation allowance and other
compensations like two meals per day, etc. and she, who travelled all the way to Mumbai,
had to bear not just the cost of accommodation, but travelling and other expenses as well. 
Pulkita agreed and could completely relate to what Harsha said, she felt that there was a need
for the company to recognise the interns and at least provide basic pay like travelling and
accommodation expenses if not the variable pay based on the performance philosophy of
paying more to people who accomplish more for the company. Adding to their misery, they
were asked to look for their own accommodation after the first week and the company would
only support them for the first week. Had they been told this before they would have arranged
their accommodation prior to the internship but now they had to manage the hectic office
schedule in a new city and parallelly look for the accommodation. So, they were neither
offered the desired project nor they were provided with some of the basic facilities they
expected.

Ashutosh joined in the conversation, he too thought that it was unfair that they were not being
compensated for the basics and was struck with a random thought, that during the time of this
pandemic, workers had another health hazard to take care of, apart from the occupational
hazards they would, otherwise, face. But now, in this new normal, they have to be assured of
the fact that they’re safe of this virus, and if in case something inevitable happens, the
company is there to safeguard them of all that follows. Pulkita looked at her watch, the break
was over and they had to return to work.
The three of them had joined the firm with great expectations. They wanted to learn, and gain
experience which would help them acquire practical skills, helping them build their career.
Ashutosh in particular did a crash course too, before joining the internship for relevant skill
development hoping that he would be using this knowledge to make a difference and
contribute meaningfully to the project. Before the internship had started, the interns were also
excited about the PPO/PPI from the company. But there was no communication from the
company about whether PPO/PPI is offered or not, if offered what would be the criterion.
They’d hoped that they would get more clarity about this during the orientation, and then
would work on the deliverables accordingly. But none of that was communicated. When
enquired by Harsha, the HR manager said that they have not yet decided on anything and
they will let the interns know at the end if they plan to give any PPO/PPI. But this left the
interns with lack of clarity on how they would be judged.

The interns had hoped to get exposure to on field work and hence decide on their future about
the kind of project and role they would want to work on. Their work on a daily basis revolved
around going through the reports the senior colleagues had made and making changes as
instructed to them. They felt that there was no value addition for them. Summer Internship
plays an important role for any student in reassessing their aspirations and interests. But, lack
of proper communication and job responsibilities from the HR was not helping these interns
make these two months productive. They started losing their interest as the time passed and
got nothing new to learn.

The 2 months went by quickly for the interns, but they were very disappointed as they could
not add much value personally and for the company through this experience. They also
recommended the HR team when asked for a feedback on the internship on what they
enjoyed about it and what could have been improved.

In the feedback the HR team found many issues the interns faced and decided that for better
engagement with the interns the next time, they need to focus on improving the following
aspects.

 Job analysis for recruiting interns

 Identify compensable factors and assign a salary structure
 Smooth onboarding mechanism
 Interaction of interns with permanent staff and seniors
 Incorporation of company culture
 Define a career trajectory for interns
 How to engage interns for the internship period to create a win-win situation
 Hand holding of Interns for smooth transition from academic to corporate culture
 Mentor for knowledge transfer and briefing the firm expectations from the interns
There are various avenues in our professional lives which help us associate ourselves with
different Human Resource concepts. What we choose to do with said avenues is what defines
us in our professional capabilities. There are instances where we can go ahead and
extrapolate scenarios and learn from them as well as create a learning platform for those
around us. It is imperative that we urge ourselves to take that extra effort into looking at
things from a different perspective so as to further better our lives professionally.