As summer break approaches, you may have started receiving internship applications from interested students, or you may be actively seeking internships yourself. As someone who makes a living connecting interns and organizations, I want to share my experience in hiring the best interns for me.
I started my company as a side project (a blog in 2010). Over the past six years, it has grown into the largest internship platform in the world, built primarily by an internship team.
Yes, in the early years there were only interns on the company team (I was the only full-time member), and even today they represent a considerable part of our team of more than 50 people. More importantly, 70% of our full-time team members started as interns. Therefore, in this sense, Internshala is a real intern, interns, and interns platform.
In the past six years, we must have gone through more than 10,000 applications, interviewed more than 2,000 applications, and recruited more than 100 interns. In addition to skills (which are required), the following are the three things I value most among internships:
An example of hard work
Entrepreneurship is long hours of work and a lot of fieldwork. You need capable people to do well. Your job, roll up your sleeves, and move on. We ask candidates to share an example in their life where they think they work the hardest, and only hire after we find the answer by meeting the criteria. This example can be anything, your board exams, competitive exams, some projects/homework in college; the point is, in your 20 years of existence, there must be at least one thing that motivates you to devote yourself to it.
True enthusiasm for working with Internshala
Candidates related to problems that our company solves on a personal level may make better contributions than candidates who may have better skills or may just be chasing money or a brand. The basic research on Internshala (such as how big the team is, what different products and services we provide, how we make money, etc.) is a fact, the best candidate will bring us many useful product or service reviews, which surprises us.
Yes, they made my company better, and some of them even ended up making video proposals for us. In order to check the sincerity of the candidate, it is always a good idea to provide a short assignment (either during the application period or at a later stage).
Humility and openness
I have been fortunate to work with some of the smartest interns over the years (speaking as a result), but none of them carry chips on their shoulders. Hiring people who are humble and willing to accept feedback will be responsible for future coaching expenses. In addition, you can build a great workplace for everyone.
To test this, we often give strong feedback on some of their previous work and ask them how to improve it; ask them to list their weaknesses; ask them who they are grateful for in life and why, and ask about their family background and Education, etc. The answers to all these questions will help you understand the real people behind your resume and their value system.
Having these three filters can almost always do the work for us. If you want to know if it is not easy for someone to avoid the answers to these questions, it usually does not happen, especially in one-on-one chats (so students are very honest), even if they do, it is easy to find out. Yes, we have to abandon many excellent candidates who do not meet the above three conditions, but according to our experience, short-term pain is worth long-term gains.
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