HR & Continuous Improvement Intern in Marion, Iowa at Acterra Group LLC

The role

We are building out our HR function, and we want help doing it. This internship is genuinely a build role: several of the things you will work on do not exist yet, and the deliverable is the thing itself — a new onboarding program, a documented hiring process, a cleaned-up records system.

The “continuous improvement” half of the title is not decoration. A company of our size runs on processes that grew by habit. Part of your job is to ask why a step exists, map what actually happens, and make it better. We will teach you how to do that.

You will report directly to our HR lead and work alongside finance, field operations, and site supervisors.

What you will work on

The mix will shift with what is live, but expect to touch most of these:

• Payroll — learn the full cycle from timecard to paycheck, including certified payroll and prevailing wage requirements on our federal work. This is specialized knowledge that transfers well.
• Benefits — help with monthly reconciliation, learn how plans and eligibility actually work, and help plan open enrollment.
• Onboarding — design a new onboarding program from the ground up. You will start by going through our current one as the newest hire and telling us what was broken about it.
• Recruiting and hiring — observe interviews, build structured interview guides, refresh job descriptions, and document the hiring process end to end.
• HR records and compliance — restructure our HR filing system, build a naming and retention standard, and learn what belongs in a personnel file and what legally does not.
• Training and development — build a training matrix by role and find the gaps.
• Process improvement — take one real, annoying HR process and fix it. Map it, analyze it, improve it, standardize it, and show us the time saved.
• Safety exposure — sit in on toolbox talks and learn how incident reporting and safety training tracking work. Light involvement, but you will see it.

Who we are looking for

You do not need HR experience. We would rather teach the technical work to someone with good judgment than the reverse.

Required

• Currently enrolled in an undergraduate program — Human Resources, Business, Communications, or a related field
• Discretion. You will see confidential information early, and handling it correctly is non-negotiable
• Clear, organized writing. A good chunk of this job is writing something down so the next person can follow it
• Comfort asking questions of people much more senior and much more experienced than you
• Reliable and self-directed enough to move a project forward between check-ins

Helpful, not required

• Coursework in HR, employment law, operations, or process improvement
• Some Excel skills
• Any prior work in a construction, industrial, manufacturing, or field-services setting