I have an LLC setup, and I have a TON of art assets I need created for an indie game. I'm willing to pay $12/hr for two interns for a few months but have NO idea how to set that up. Is there some sort of legal requirement I need to do for this?

Do I need to contact local universities and setup a program, BEFORE allowing any students to come in? Or can I literally just start marketing around campuses (flyers, whatever) and if a student is interested, he just... joins up and gets permission?

Just want to cover ALL bases.

A: What is your location. Laws in the US are different from Canada, and those are different from places in other parts of the world.

B: Why not just contact a professor at the University and ask them? They might even be able to throw names your way and cut your searching down to nothing.

I have an LLC setup, and I have a TON of art assets I need created for an indie game. I'm willing to pay $12/hr for two interns for a few months but have NO idea how to set that up. Is there some sort of legal requirement I need to do for this?

Do I need to contact local universities and setup a program, BEFORE allowing any students to come in? Or can I literally just start marketing around campuses (flyers, whatever) and if a student is interested, he just... joins up and gets permission?

Just want to cover ALL bases.

If you own a corporation and you want someone to work for that corporation, then yes there are a lot of legal requirements for this. You have to verify eligibility or set them up as a contractor (1099). There's a lot of requirements for accounting and forms when hiring employees or paying wages, so you'll either need to do a lot of research on your own or hire an accountant or tax attorney.

If your interns are immigrants, there's even more involved, and there are restrictions on the amount of hours they can work if they are students depending on their visa type.

You don't HAVE to ask permission from the school to hire an intern, but if you go and talk to the dean of the department you want to hire from, you will get better candidates and get a constant supply of talent as long as you need it. From personal experience, this has really paid off.

I have an LLC setup, and I have a TON of art assets I need created for an indie game. I'm willing to pay $12/hr for two interns for a few months but have NO idea how to set that up. Is there some sort of legal requirement I need to do for this?

Do I need to contact local universities and setup a program, BEFORE allowing any students to come in? Or can I literally just start marketing around campuses (flyers, whatever) and if a student is interested, he just... joins up and gets permission?

Just want to cover ALL bases.

The laws related to have employees can be quite convoluted, and will vary from state to state, and certainly country. I know very little about it, but if you want to be dead sure you're going to have to contact a lawyer. I don't know if it's any different than having a regular employee, so if you have all of that legal work set up you might be fine. No one would likely notice if you paid them with personal checks though, but I have no idea how you account for this in business expenses or taxes.

As for getting a local university to help find prospective students: you can probably contact their career centers if they have any (I suspect they would). They probably have internal systems for getting job opportunities to their students, and may require formalities when allowing internships to count for graduation requirements. My university was pretty lax on this. Although I didn't have to have an internship as part of my graduation requirements, I've spoken to one guy who did, and apparently all he had to do was get his employer to sign off on some paper work and it was happy trails.

Contacting professors directly also works. I frequently get emails from my department professors about job opportunities that were emailed to them directly. This is likely to work faster than going through any career center, since if many students are like I was, they don't bother to check in on it very often (or at all), whereas my professors email out these opportunities to our university email accounts (which I check semi frequently).