Paid or Un-paid, THAT is the Question...

I came across an interesting perspective today at work. I have been working with a local community college so we can start bringing in Interns for some projects we have going on this year. The first project is a series of seminars – mainly the internship handles a lot of the administrative support the agents don’t want to do and will give the interns incredible experience in marketing, running and managing these kinds of events. On the plus side the interns get paid based on how many people they can bring to the seminar.

So while I was meeting with the college reps today, one lady was concerned about the $8-$10 per person pay structure we had set in place. They weren't concerned that they were getting paid, but they were concerned with a ‘commission based’ pay structure. So they considered taking the internship from being ‘paid’ to ‘non-paid.’ The ladies who I was working with said they try to stamp out ‘commission based’ jobs; which to be honest I completely understand if we were going door to door selling pest control. But I told them that to expect another intern to do the same work, but not be paid wouldn't be fair (because we are also getting other students from different schools that have no problem with the pay structure). They countered my concern with, "well you would need to edit out the paid responsibilities so they would just do the non-paid part."

No sorry, in the real world employers don't cut out responsibilities because the new hires don't like the pay structure. Basing the pay on commission is a win-win. College students get experience to the financial and insurance industry (which is, by the way, primarily commission based and people make millions of dollars doing it), but they get to do the background work (market planning, building the presentations, market research) and then reap the rewards of their own labor by getting people to the seminars. If we take out the pay, we can’t expect them to work as hard to do all that we need.

Unfortunately, we had to pass with this particular college, and what makes me sad is that students aren't even aware that this choice was made on their behalf. I bet some of them would've loved the opportunity and excelled in the task. 100% of the students don't get the opportunity because the school didn't like 20% of the expectation.