Why we hired interns the past two summers, and why we’ll do it again
I’ve got to admit, I was VERY skeptical about hiring interns at my startup. We are a small team, and managing a bunch of college students who didn’t know how to write emails or work autonomously was scary. My time is precious, and I did not want a summer full of “this is how you setup a calendar invite.”
There are companies who can think longer term about their hiring needs, and view internships as more of a full time hiring funnel than as a way to get meaningful work done. As a startup, we don’t have that luxury.
Let me take a step back and tell you about our situation. I’m the CEO of a small Cambridge SaaS business called Nextwave Hire. We help companies build their employer brands through authentic employee stories that live in career pages, social media, email marketing, and more. We also help talent acquisition teams understand the core analytics around their online marketing channels. While small, we’ve got customers like Dropbox, Monster.com, CEB and more on our roster.
Things have been going well, and we’re always looking for a few extra hands to take care of everything from writing blog posts to writing code. So, naturally, the idea of hiring a few interns was brought up at some point. As I said, I was skeptical at first.
However, at the urging of my co-founder, we took a risk and hired two interns in 2015, and another last summer.
In 2015 we had a marketing and engineering intern. Both were fantastic, and I’m not just saying that. They came in with some general knowledge of their functional areas. Our marketing intern knew a bit about SEO, could write well, and was generally speaking a pretty creative and numbers driven person. The engineer of course knew how to code, and was able to pick up the basics of our stack in about a week.
They both added huge value to our company, and quite simply got work done that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible with our current team. The same thing happened this past summer where our engineering intern built two features that helped us land our first Fortune 500 customer. Wow.
Of course, I’m not saying that all interns are made equal. We had to be selective in who we hired. We put candidates through some rigorous tests to make sure they were coachable, and also had an existing skill set.
To get this caliber of people, we made sure to offer interesting work, mentorship, and a differentiated experience versus other firms. Our intern this past summer had offers that would have paid him at least 2x what we were able to pay, but we convinced him by sharing what our interns had done in the past (namely through our own employer branding software that we sell to companies).
My advice is to consider an internship program if you haven’t already started one. You’ll be surprised at how professionally advanced a lot of college students are, and you can build your talent pipeline for full time recruiting. More than that, we are still friends with all of our interns who come to our regular happy hours. Good luck!
