Tips for applying to an internship
Renewing a tradition in GoCardless, we have been reviewing a lot of CVs lately to select interns for our next summer season of internships. I’m grateful to see a lot of enthusiasm in the candidates and I would like to share some tips on how to make the application easier for everyone.
Do you need a Visa?
Let’s talk about the toughest item first, explicitly say you are able to take the offer, you don’t need to accept it before hand. Make sure that if you don’t need a VISA you stated it clearly. It’s sad to reject a candidate just because you need a visa and we cannot apply to it due to regulations.
In addition, make sure you don’t have any specific Non-Disclosure or Non-Compete agreements that would not allow you to join. This seldom happens but when it happens it complicates a lot the work of everyone.
Be concise
The recruiters need to skim through severals CVs to make the first selection for contacting. We can’t spend a lot of time assessing your notes.
One of the best compendium of resources on writing is the IEEE PCS, for instance this example is great:
“…a new consumer device that allows users to communicate vocally in real time.” Write instead:
“…a new cell phone.”
Be specific
Clarify what you learned and which skills you developed. It is hard to achieve results in 3 months or less so don’t overflow with fierce prose. Compare the sentences:
- “During one of my internships I worked on several web-systems with great success.”
- “During my internship at “X” I learned about SCRUM in a team of 5 and created a MEAN(MongoDB, ExpressJS…) application. While at “Y” I created a HAPI (NodeJS) application for a Kanban board backend”.
The second phrase clearly tell me that you wouldn’t need to ramp up on Agile practices or in Web Apps as general concepts. Time goes by really quickly in an internship and I’d rather spend the time tackling an actual problem.
Take a moment to review formatting
Care for the formatting, the fonts, punctuation, check the spelling, have someone else to review it for you. The standard things you would do for a brief essay, i.e. avoid “approximatively” use approximately.
What do I do?
When we have a lot of CVs to screen and recruiters need a hand I review CVs for them. Do you know someone who is studying Computer Science or related topics and wants to do an internship with us in London? Know some web technologies? You need to be able to work in UK, no visa sponsorship this time sorry :(
