Building an Intern Army
One of my proudest achievements at Indigo is the development of an internship program that saw us recruit and mentor students from local universities over the past couple of years. Hiring in technology is hard. There is immense pressures to finding talent based on how competitive the job market is in Toronto. I was a lucky beneficiary of a fantastic internship program (University of Waterloo) that allowed me to develop real world experience that confirmed my ambition to enter the software engineering field. I was presented with the perfect opportunity to “pay it forward” now as a software development manager faced with the need to grow the team over the next few years. Initially the plan was to hire two interns for a 16 month term to gradually grow the program and learn. We decided to scale the program out after our first two hires turned out to be mouth-dropping brilliant. This internship program had been a win-win-win situation for the company, the team, and the intern.
The Company
How do you find talent in a competitive market for the current and the future? How would you find these top performers in a sustainable way that’s mutually beneficial for the company and the employee? An enormous benefit of a strong continuous internship program is the opportunity to learn about an individual as a viable candidate for a permanent position in the future given the nature of rising costs of recruitment or a bad hire. This gives the first opportunity for employers to hire developers that are not only qualified but already have a wealth of experience with the systems and processes of the company. A positive internship experience will enable these students to return and share with their peers and networks that furthers ease future hiring.
Tangible business outcomes accomplished from our first couple of interns (and each interns we have hired) showed that internship programs are not only for the future, but has dramatic immediate business value. Andrew was one of our first interns and alongside his mentor Terence helped produced a brand new IPhone application for Indigo, written from scratch. Aishwarya, was another example where she used her academic knowledge to produce a colour detection algorithm to help us boost the relevancy of our search engine. The list goes on about the achievement from each of our interns and continues to grow.
The Team
I place a heavy emphasis on hiring people with curiosity. While interviewing prospective interns, it was impressive to learn that they already have strong technical foundations combined with a thirst for more knowledge.
Our interns provided perfect mentorship opportunities for our junior members giving them valuable experience in leading and guiding more inexperienced developers on their team. It is rare that junior developers have opportunities to learn this skill early on in their careers. With the support from myself and other senior team members, we were able to see our junior staff grow immensely in many soft skills.
Building great products requires inspiration and collaboration from all angles especially when building an e-commerce website where everyone can be a customer. I’ve found with new hires to a company: they ask questions and push the envelope. Questioning the status quo reflects the academic environment interns are familiar with. It’s also their first time seeing the product, so they might have an idea no one else has tried which gives fresh perspectives to the team.
Have a side project to tackle but all your current staff are allocated to projects? Interns provide an opportunity for us to build small tools and software that improve the lives of our development team. For example, we had one intern configured an automated code linting process that allowed the upskilling of the individual but the benefits was widespread across the entire development team.
The Intern
Providing real work experience to interns requires planning and foresight into the product roadmap which was a conscious decision I planned out when embarking on this journey. Having experienced a wide spectrum of internships with varying levels of quality, I was mindful to provide an ecosystem where interns gain real world experience. I want to create at environment that teaches these interns the necessary soft and hard skills to inspire them to become entrepreneurs of the next generation.
Our interns shipped real features and bug fixes to production alongside the rest of their scrum teams. They played an instrumental part in sprint delivery, and were involved in the full product development journey. We treated our interns like full time developers. Each team lead has a key objective to provide opportunities for every intern to flourish just like any other team member.
“Indigo was my first experience in a professional setting. It gave me a great deal of insight into how companies progress while also fostering a useful learning environment.” Aishwarya R. Our first development intern hire.
Summary
Internships can be an invaluable learning experience but it takes a conscious effort from both parties to make it successful. If you’re looking to attract the right talent, you need to offer the right experience as the benefits will have dramatic positive impacts on the business, team and the interns. A special thanks goes out to our mentorship buddies for helping create the environment for our interns: Anthony, George, Terence, Zach, David, and Bane.
If you have any questions or comments or wish to discuss anything in more detail, please leave a comment below.
