Finding the perfect fit for your company – A complete guide
About the Author: Varun Chawla is an ex-management consultant turned entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of WatStory, a multi-language (English, Hindi, and Bengali) community and platform for writing, reading, and sharing interesting stories and ideas.
In the course of running WatStory, we have worked with over 20 interns across Indian schools and colleges. These interns have played varied roles across Strategy and Research, Digital Marketing, Campus Outreach, and Editorial & Journalism. Finding and managing interns has been an interesting learning experience for us. Some of the important learnings so far have been –
1. Make the internship post comprehensive: It took a high level of clarity and time on our part to create the role descriptions. This effort helped in the follow-up selection process because the applicants had a better sense of the role and the associated expectations. Additionally, the applicants could assess the role on the learning potential and the experience it offered and not just base their decision on the stipend and perks. The role description also helped to weed out the non-serious applicants because their applications clearly showed that they had not taken the time to read the role properly.
2. Ask for prior work samples: As we were hiring for editorial roles, being comfortable with the written word was a prerequisite. We asked the applicants to submit prior writing samples. Although this meant going through 2-3 samples per applicant and required more time to evaluate, it gave us a good perspective on the applicant’s creative style and abilities. We also gave the candidates the option to create new samples in their chosen language and on their topic of interest. This way, people who were interested in the role but didn’t have any prior samples could apply too.
3. Respond to most if not all candidates: For our last posting, we ended up engaging with a sizable portion of the candidates. Taking the time to respond to the applicants and their emails gave us a sense of whether our role had resonance with the intern pool, helped us clarify the doubts that applicants had, helped people understand why we did not find them suitable for our current opening, and also resulted in us identifying a few people who were not a good fit for the current role, due to timelines or skill set mismatch, but had good potential for other roles that we had planned for the future.
4. Talk to the shortlisted candidates: We structured our calls with the shortlisted candidates such that it began with us giving them a brief summary of the role. This meant the role requirements were on the top of their minds and this set the call nicely for us to ask them detailed questions around their action plan and ability to fill the various facets of the role. We also shared the experiences of our past interns with the shortlisted candidates so they could get a sense of the learnings and the difficulties associated with the role.
5. Forget the ego: Sometimes after completing the hiring process, which involved effort and time, the hired interns will drop out. Though it is good to understand the reason why they drop out, sometimes there is nothing you or the organization can do about it. You need to make peace with this fact.
6. Give the interns a lot of freedom: For an organization like ours for which creativity is the bedrock, giving the hired interns immense freedom to ideate and execute after ensuring they understand the end goal properly is almost essential. In our experience, the interns, considering that most of them are fairly new to the professional set up, will sometimes miss deadlines but with enough encouragement and direction they rise to the occasion, learn a lot, and end up surprising you with the results.
When all is said and done, there is no ‘perfect’ intern. All interns come with their unique strengths; it is up to the hiring organization to provide them an environment where they can learn and produce great results.
