PRO on the Go Video: Internships as a Hiring Tool

Making great hires is essential for today's painting contractor. Dave Scaturro of Alpine Painting tells how a well-designed internship program can help you find the best talent and fuel productivity and growth.

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Video Transcription:

Narrator:

Working as an intern in college, Dave Scaturro saw first hand the value and new ideas they could offer. Now, he’s leading an internship program to find the best new talent for his family’s painting business.

Dave Scaturro, Alpine Painting and Sandblasting:

What we do is reach out to the local universities and we acquire students who are looking to get real life experience in what they do in their fields. So, we incorporate everything from project management, to estimating, accounting, marketing and we bring students in typically their third or fourth year and we give them an opportunity to shine. And, they offer different perspectives then what we would typically get from the work force. They really look at our company through a new lens.

Narrator:

Working with the career development programs at local universities, Alpine Painting has developed a structured system to find quality interns. The best candidates turn into full-time employees.

Dave Scaturro:

We recently hired one of our interns who interned for us in the summers for two years on as a full-time basis. He’s now our Quality and Safety Manager for the company. That was always his passion to incorporate a higher level of quality and safety on our jobs and has basically taken a lot of our ideas and put them into a strategic plan. He’s also incorporated technology into the mix where now all of our crew leaders have an iPad and they have seamless information that’s flowing to and from the office to the job site. It has detailed quality report forms they can fill out easily with drop down boxes so it’s an efficient process. They can get all of the information to the customers, they understand what the production rates need to be for the job, and everybody is working together to achieve that common goal.