Why You Should Hire Interns to Do Real Work
I’ve seen and experienced how bad internships demoralize people. I met Amar Varma during an internship when we were attending the University of Waterloo. It was a good company, but we didn’t work on anything meaningful because we weren’t allowed to. The result was much of the time we were bored, so it was a waste on both sides.
Throughout my career, I had always worked with interns, at companies of different sizes. Somewhere along the way, someone had decided that interns shouldn’t be trusted with important work.
At that company our criteria was inane:
- can’t cause too much damage
- won’t have to worry about it when they leave
- won’t have to watch them all the time
- what’s the least amount of work for me
When we started hiring interns at Xtreme Labs, Amar and I promised each other we wouldn’t subject them to the same crappy experience we had. Our philosophy was, “There are no intern projects, there are just projects.”
If you hire interns and only give them make-work or side projects, you’re wasting your money and their time.
Here’s why you should not only hire interns, but also give them real projects to work on:
- Network: If you hire lots of interns, that can turn into a pipeline of future employees for your company.
- Imprinting: Teach them how to work and you’re setting them up for life.
- Reinvention: Always make your team better.
- Relevance: Millennials are soon going to be a majority of the workforce; if you’re not hiring them now, you’re making a big mistake.
Step 1: Build Your Network
I always say that interviews are never a good indicator of what the job or the employee is actually like. No engineer actually spends their workday writing code on a whiteboard. But an internship is a great indicator of mutual fit, if you give your interns meaningful projects.
By giving them real work, their sense of responsibility goes up. They don’t feel like they’re just being given a useless side project, they’re actually contributing something important. That usually makes them step up and really commit themselves to doing their best work. They see they’re part of the core team.
As the employer, you get a taste for how they perform in your environment doing real work, and they get a taste of what working for your company is like.
And if you pair your interns with full-times (I discuss this pair programming more here), then that gives you the headcount openings to hire lots of people.
Go wide, then decide (i.e., let the not-so-great-ones get eliminated from your pool).
That’s how you build a pipeline: fill your funnel and narrow it down to the ones who can actually do the job. Each side knows what they’re getting into, so you can extend job offers to your interns post-graduation and be confident they’ll be good hires. They know your culture, your workforce, the kinds of projects you do, and your expectations.
In turn, those employees will hire the next cohort of interns (the pipeline is perpetuated). They’ll know what the indicators are that a student has the aptitude to be a great hire, if only they can be properly trained.
So how do you train people who’ve never had a “real” job before?
Step 2: Imprinting
Teach an Intern to Fish…
In 1999, the city of Drachten, Netherlands began removing its traffic lights, replacing them with “a roundabout, an extended cycle path and pedestrian area.” The goal was to reduce the number of traffic-related incidents by forcing drivers, pedestrians and cyclists to be hyper-conscious of their surroundings and therefore take extra precautions. Since then, several other cities have tried their own variation of this experiment, and have reported success in the amount of reduced collisions, congestion, injuries, and fatalities.
You should take the same approach with internships: make them responsible for their work by removing their safety controls.
Instead of having their work and communications checked by a supervisor before going to the client, have them contact the client directly. They’ll be much more careful if they’re told that what they’re doing is important and it will reflect badly on them if they screw up. They will feel the danger. They’ll still make mistakes, but so will your full-times. Importantly, they will learn what you want them to learn, which is how to handle themselves professionally.
There is a concept called “career imprinting.” Harvard professor Monica Higgins describes it as “the process by which individuals pick up or cultivate a certain set of capabilities, connections, confidence, and cognition due to their work experiences at a particular employer.”
That’s a little wordy, so I summarize it as:
The first job someone has after graduating is going to teach them how to work for the rest of their career.
If you are a curious student reading this— I share some advice on how to pick your co-op placement in this article.
This is why interns are great: you show them a certain way of working and that will stick with them. They’ll be able to look back one day and say, “Wow, I really learned how to work there, and now I’m applying it to other places.”
I think that’s very powerful, and an amazing opportunity for them and for you as their employer.
The interesting thing about hiring young people is they typically don’t have domain expertise. Their tendency is to fall back on first principles thinking. They’ll ask, “Why can’t things work this way?” because they don’t come with all the baggage of someone who’s been doing it a long time.
I’ve found it to be the same with interns: they ask questions and push the envelope. Questioning the status quo reflects the academic environment they’re familiar with. It’s also their first time seeing the product, so they might have an idea no one else has tried.
Some might find that frustrating, but the concept of career imprinting was something I’ve always taken seriously. It’s a lot of responsibility to mentor people, but the rewards are tremendous.
So what do you do with all these smart people coming into the workforce but who don’t necessarily know how to work? What’s the best way to show them how to work at your company?
Not surprisingly, my answer is: pair interns with your full-times. They and the company will all benefit.
Step 3: Continuously Reinvent
Instead of giving your interns busy work, pair each one up with a full-time. They need to work together on a real project. The intern can learn and ask questions, and the full-time can teach and assess the intern’s abilities. Pairing is the best way to determine if an intern would be a good full-time employee once they graduate, in terms of both skill and cultural fit.
An intern should be seen as just another smart person that a full-time can bounce ideas off of.
Full-times may resist, but it’s like bad medicine: the pros outweigh the cons. The first couple weeks of an internship term, the full-times will complain that the interns don’t know anything and it’s painful to integrate them. But by the time the internship is over, more often than not the full-times (and customers!) will tell you not to let them go back to school because they’re so valuable.
In my experience, ramp-up was painful every term, but it wasn’t terrible. No one ever quit because they absolutely couldn’t tolerate working with interns. Paradoxically, a lot of the full-times who complained had previously been interns. It was like they forgot what it was like when they were an intern, which I always thought was funny. So be prepared for some moaning and complaining, but know that it will pass quickly.
Another benefit of pairing is when your interns go back to school, their knowledge doesn’t leave with them. It’s shared with at least one other person, and ideally with the entire project team.
As far as risks go, I think internships are less risky than hiring full-times. You’re only committing to a four to eight-month work term; their salaries are lower; and their work always has a second set of eyes on it.
Putting aside skill — because I’ve already established interns are generally lacking in real-world skills — the biggest risks are they won’t be a good fit or won’t be a fast learner. But those are the risks you take on with hiring full-times as well.
If an intern really isn’t working out, it’s not likely you’d fire them, since they’re only going to be working for you a short time. In this case putting them on a make-work project probably is the best solution. But in the history of my career I’d say this has happened less than 5% of the time. That’s a small enough chance that hiring interns for real work far outweighs the likelihood of them not working out.
I’ve seen interns bring a lot of energy to an organization, even to the full-times. I’ve seen interns push the full-times to move faster. Hell, I’ve had interns give me feedback on the full-times, telling me they were too slow or too inexperienced in a certain domain.
If that’s behaviour you’d encourage in your full-times (and you should), then encourage it in your interns as well. It’s all about getting better — the company, the full-times, and the interns.
Step 4: Remain Relevant
Besides pushing all of you to get better, interns also keep you relevant.
In a multi-year study published in 2011, PwC estimated that “by 2020, millennials will form 50% of the global workforce.”
You already know your workforce is going to end up there. So aren’t you better off incorporating that group now into your company?
After all, who should be producing your next-gen products: someone who’s on Snapchat and Whatsapp, or someone who relies on the Yellow Pages? Of course you should be hiring the “digital natives,” those who “have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age.”
This generation grew up with technology and doesn’t have domain expertise. That’s very powerful.
For example, right now AI/machine learning is all the rage. These are such new areas that companies specializing in those can only hire new grads because they’re the only ones with experience. They haven’t actually worked anywhere before, but they’re entering these fields and are really on the cutting edge of learning.
Learning is a continuous process, so who better to bring into your company than people with that early academic background?
Understanding how to give those kinds of employees projects and autonomy is important. You’re going to have to teach them domain expertise regardless, because if you’re in autonomous cars there’s no one doing what you’re doing.
At Xtreme Labs, we built mobile apps. Xtreme started in 2007, the year the iPhone came out. We didn’t have employees with ten years of experience developing for iOS because it hadn’t been around that long!
I learned this the hard way: I started my MBA in 2004, which was many years after I’d graduated with my BMath. It was way harder to go back to school when I was 30, than it was to go for the first time at 19. As an undergrad I was used to taking tests and learning, but by 30 I was used to full-time work.
I was reminded of that experience when I read a Harvard Business Review article that said you should never have any meeting without at least one person under 30 in it.
So hire young, and keep building that pipeline in order to remain relevant.
Parting Words
Look at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter: they all hire interns. What have they figured out that other companies haven’t? Internships work. There’s no way those companies are hiring interns, only to put them on useless projects. They’re looking for future employees and have realized this is one of the best ways to create that pipeline.
If you don’t believe in internships as a learning opportunity for them and yourself, it’s not going to be successful for either of you. Pair them with your full-times to teach them how to work, making them and your business better.
Internships are the best way to figure out who has natural aptitude and can cultivate it by working on real projects for real clients.
There was a Hacker Rank blog posted recently about the top coding schools in the world. While everyone was commenting about where Waterloo or Berkeley placed, the real story was that the #2 school is a high school in China.
I repeat: the second best coding school in the world is a high school.
If the high school is beating you, why wouldn’t you hire them as your interns?
[Edit] I just got asked if I believe in unpaid internships. In short, I don’t. If you’re doing it right, your interns will be doing real work and should be paid what they’re worth.
Sign up here if you’re curious about what we’re building at Helpful. We’ll invite you to be a beta customer soon!
Better yet — read this blog post by Emily. She’s a Mechatronics Engineering student at the University of Waterloo that loved working with Helpful during her co-op.
