Written By: Hanssel Felix, Financial Manager
The Hidden Cost of Doing the Right Work at the Wrong Level
Imagine you have an employee earning $70,000 a year. They’re experienced, dependable, and good at what they do. They’re also spending several hours each week on data entry, organizing information, conducting basic research, routine follow-up, and preparing reports.
The work matters. It needs to get done. But here’s the question:
Does it require a $70,000-a-year employee to do it?
At first glance, this might seem like a question about payroll. It isn’t. You’re already paying the employee their salary. Giving five hours of their routine work to someone else isn’t going to suddenly reduce that expense.
The real cost is what those five hours could have produced instead.
What project isn’t moving forward? What process hasn’t been improved? What client isn’t being supported? What problem keeps getting pushed to next week because your experienced employees are buried in work that doesn’t require their experience?
In finance, we call this OPPORTUNITY COST. In everyday business, I think of it more simply:
Are your people spending their time where they’re most valuable?
And this problem may be bigger than we realize. Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends research found that surveyed workers reported spending 41% of their daily time on work that doesn’t contribute to the value their organization creates. Only 22% said their organizations were highly effective at simplifying work.
That’s a lot of capacity potentially hiding in plain sight.
When organizations feel stretched, the question is often, “Do we need another employee?” Before answering that, I would ask a different question:
Is the work we already have sitting with the right people?
You can start answering that today.
Ask someone on your team: “What are three things you do every week that need to get done but don’t require your level of experience?”
You may hear things like research, data entry, reporting, customer follow-up, documentation, project coordination, outreach, or administrative work.
Don’t immediately ask, “Could an intern do this?” Instead, ask: “Could someone early in their career develop valuable skills by learning to take ownership of this?”
That’s an important distinction.
The goal isn’t to replace experienced employees with less expensive ones. It’s to create capacity for experienced employees while creating opportunities for emerging talent.
If a manager gets five hours back each week, the organization hasn’t saved five hours of salary. What has changed is what those five hours can produce. Maybe that manager can now develop their team, improve a process, strengthen a client relationship, analyze performance, or finally move forward on a project that’s been sitting on the back burner.
Meanwhile, an emerging professional isn’t simply being handed “busy work.” They’re learning how a workplace operates, developing technical and professional skills, receiving feedback, and gradually taking ownership of real responsibilities.
That’s where a good internship creates value in both directions.
There’s another benefit that may not show up immediately on a financial statement: you’re developing your future workforce.
According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ 2026 Internship & Co-op Survey, employers converted 63.1% of their 2024–25 interns into full-time employees, the highest conversion rate reported in five years.
The relationship works from the other direction, too. Handshake’s 2025 Internship Index, based on a survey of more than 6,000 students and recent graduates, found that nearly 80% of students who completed an internship said the experience had a moderate or significant impact on their interest in working full-time for that employer.
Think about what happens during a meaningful internship. You see how someone communicates. You see whether they’re dependable. You see how they learn, solve problems, respond to feedback, and interact with your team.
By the time a full-time opportunity becomes available, that individual may no longer be an unknown candidate represented by a résumé and a few interviews. You’ve already seen them work.
Of course, simply hiring an intern doesn’t create these results. Employers still need meaningful responsibilities, training, supervision, feedback, and a plan for how the intern will grow.
That’s why the first step isn’t posting an internship. It’s identifying the opportunity.
Try This Today
Before the end of the week, identify three to five recurring responsibilities within your organization that:
- need to get done;
- don’t require the experience level of the person currently doing them; and
- could teach someone a valuable professional skill.
You may have just identified the foundation of your next internship.
And if you’re thinking, “I can identify the work, but I’m not sure how to turn it into an internship,” that’s exactly where Tomorrow’s Talent can help.
We work with employers to take real business needs and turn them into meaningful internship opportunities by identifying appropriate responsibilities, considering what a student can learn and contribute, and connecting employers with emerging talent.
And sometimes, identifying the opportunity isn’t the biggest barrier. It’s everything that comes after it.
Hiring. Onboarding. Payroll. Workers’ compensation. Timekeeping. Compliance. Administration.
Through our Employer of Record (EOR) services, Tomorrow’s Talent can help remove much of that administrative burden as well, allowing employers to create opportunities without having to build all of the infrastructure themselves.
So start with a simple question:
What work needs to get done?
You may already have an opportunity sitting inside your organization. And if you do, Tomorrow’s Talent can help you turn that work into an experience that creates value on both sides.
Sometimes the solution isn’t adding more work to your organization.