Hiring a graphic design intern is a decision about teaching capacity as much as talent. Confirm who will review work weekly before advertising, then judge portfolios on thinking rather than polish: sketches, iterations and the reasoning behind a layout. Recruit through design courses and student communities, and time the search around the academic calendar.
Course leaders are the shortcut. Tutors on design programmes know which students hit deadlines, take criticism and actually finish things, and a relationship with two or three courses produces better candidates than any advert. End-of-year shows and degree exhibitions let you see a whole cohort's work in an afternoon, with the students standing beside it to explain their thinking. Student design societies, university career services and portfolio platforms filtered to recent graduates all work. Your own designers usually know someone. Keep the application short and visual, ask for a portfolio link rather than a formal covering letter, and host the [graphic design intern job description](/job-descriptions/graphic-design-intern) on a [careers page](/careers-page-builder) that displays properly on a phone.
Be specific about what the intern gets, because that is what they are choosing between. Name the mentor who will review their work and how often that review happens. Describe the real deliverables rather than shadowing: social assets, campaign adaptations, presentation templates, packaging support, whatever the studio genuinely produces. State the duration, the hours and the tools provided. Say plainly whether the internship is paid, and follow the rules that apply where you operate, since unpaid arrangements are regulated differently across jurisdictions. Explain whether a permanent role is possible afterwards and what would make that happen. Adverts that describe critique, mentoring and finished portfolio pieces attract ambitious students; adverts full of company adjectives attract nobody in particular.
Look for process, not polish. A student portfolio full of beautiful mockups tells you very little, because template mockups flatter weak work. What matters is evidence of thinking: sketches, rejected directions, the brief they set themselves, iterations that clearly responded to feedback, and one project explained from problem to output. Check typographic basics carefully, since spacing, hierarchy and alignment reveal training that trend-following hides. Be alert to group coursework presented as individual work, and ask directly which parts they made. A narrower portfolio with genuine reasoning beats a broad one assembled from tutorials, because reasoning is what you can develop and taste tends to follow it. Ask for the working files on one project as well, since layer naming and artboard discipline say more about studio readiness than any finished image does.
Two things: a walkthrough and a critique test. Ask the candidate to talk through one project in their own words, including what went wrong and what they would change now. Vague answers usually mean the tutor drove the decisions. Then run the critique test: show them a piece of work and give honest feedback on it, then watch whether they defend, freeze or explore. The ability to take criticism and return with something genuinely different is the single best predictor of whether an internship works. Add a short paid brief with real constraints, a few hours at most. Draw the rest from structured [design intern interview questions](/interview-questions/graphic-design-intern) about tools, deadlines and collaboration.
Structure decides everything. Interns leave with nothing when the programme is improvised, and studios then conclude that interns are not worth hiring. Give the intern a proper onboarding, a named mentor with protected review time, defined deliverables with real deadlines, and exposure to client feedback rather than a filtered version of it. Book a weekly critique and never cancel it. Hold a mid-point review so problems get corrected while there is still time. Decide about a permanent role before the end date, not after they have left, and keep every good intern in a talent pool inside your [applicant tracking system](/ats) so the next junior vacancy starts with people you have already watched work.
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