The young and talented — welcome to Jit Team! part3

The summer has gone by so quickly! Maybe because we were more busy than ever! As you may remember, this year our internship program was, how to put it…, LEGENDARY! We even wrote two articles to talk about the entire process of recruiting such a big number of inters, take a look: part1, part 2.

Just to summarise, before giving you more details about the actual effects of givig over forty young people a chance to develop their IT skills: we used the amazing platform called Spatial Chat to run a massive recruitment process without anyone leaving their comfortable sofas or desks at home. Yes, we managed to talks to over eighty candidates in one evening and nobody was at risk of contracting Covid-19 since they didn’t even leave their homes.

Of course, the onboarding process and introducing such a numerous group of interns was a challenge, but we were born to tackle those! All the participants of the program were divided into groups, who worked on different projects.

We always try to gather as much feedback about such initiatives as possible, so obviously, we asked the interns what their thoughts about the recruitment process were. Here are some of their opinions:

‘The entire process was swift and well-organised. It surprised me that it was less stressful than a face-to face meeting at the office.’

‘Jit had a very creative approach to the recruitment process, it was obvious that this kind of job interview was new both to the interviewers and candidates. Nevertheless, the experience was positive.’

‘Until the recruitment process for this internship program, I never took part in anything like that. Spatial Chat was great.’

While working on their IT skils for those three months of the program, the interns were given many fascinating tasks. They worked on developing five of our internal projects. Those usually serve as safe playgrounds to try out new technologies; in the case of an internship program, internal projects can easily do the job of ‘pretending’ to be a commercial project — with a ‘customer’, sprints, and real-life teams. Some of the interns worked on WeJit — our internal platform with employees’ profiles used by the employees themselves and the HRs and sales team — adding new functionalities and improving the existing ones was definitely a challenge. Another group of interns had a chance to get to know and advance our Timeports application used to plan business trips and clock in/out of work. Some of the time was devoted to start up new projects/ideas — the ones we can’t really share with you yet. All in all, we do hope we gave our inters a chance to see what it is like to be part of a development team.

We really like meeting new people and learning their system of gaining new skills and completing tasks. That’s why, we regularly organise events we call Jit Talks. These are lectures prepared by Jiters for Jiters. For years, we have organised many of such meet-ups and we didn't even give up on them when Covid-19 hit. Since this year’s internship program received a lot of publicity amon Jit Team employees, we decided to give the stage of one of the Jit Talks event to the inters! They had space and time to talk about their experiences, lessons learned, and challenges they faced in those three months. The wow factor of this event was the fact that it was even more popular among Jiters than regular Jit Talks! This gave the interns more and more motivation to expand their knowledge.

There are many conclusions we can draw basing on our experiences gained during this internship program. Is there any space to do things better? Of course! However, we are very happy that both the interns and Jiters involved in running the program were very positive about the experience!