GUEST COMMENT: Interns are irritating

I'm not the biggest fan of the HR function at the best of times (remind me again, how you are going to add value by interviewing my candidate for a complex derivatives structuring role?) but when they start sending round emails about interns, I run for the hills.

Interns are extremely irritating. They start being irritating before they even enter the building. Some HR body, who clearly has nothing better to do, will start to agitate for volunteers to interview the candidates and review the 'program'. Hardly anyone wants to do this and the people who do shouldn't be allowed to. They are either desperate to be senior to someone else and, in their position, an intern is their only chance; or they should really be working in HR.

If they are extremely aggravating, the interns themselves will start to phone up anyone who they think might be able to help them get a place. Fine if you actually know the person you are calling, suicide if you don't.

Once they are come through the door, interns up the exasperation quotient significantly.

HR will obviously have spent hours on email and on the phone beforehand attempting to gather your desks' requirements and to match them to skills of the chosen ones. They do this every year, so how come you've suddenly got three instead of one, they arrive on the Tuesday a week before you were told to expect them and two of them want to be traders when you're running a sales team. To be fair to HR, as I suppose one must attempt to be, at this age they don't really have any skills so it might be easier just to pick them out of a hat.

One you've been allocated the vexatious group you have to find things for them to do. It's astonishing how difficult it is to find essentially skill free work that is needed immediately and yet will have no impact when it is somehow done wrong. It is especially hard to do this when being started at by three doe eyed interns (or, more likely, one doe eyed, one terrified and one who believes he - it's always a he - is doing you a favour by being there).

So you struggle through the first few days, they break the photo copier, spill the coffee and are bemused when you ask them to give documents an editorial review as they have never been taught the rules of grammar or how to spell. If you're lucky, after the first week they fall back on their basic survival skills, stop hanging round your desk and find members of the team who are willing to give them some time. All goes quiet. If you're unlucky, there will be an incident with a swear word and a pejorative comparison on the trading floor or, even worse, with a night out and some FX traders and you end up with HR again.

Six weeks or so later and they're gone. Irritatingly, at least one of them will have managed to make him or herself useful and will actually be missed. The rest of them will be forgotten about until six months later when they start making phone calls to try and get you to recommend them for the grad program.