Working with interns – A wonderful journey
About the Author: Asim Patel, an IIT-Delhi & IIM-Calcutta alumnus, is the founder & MD of GO-BIO Retail, an Agri-Tech startup. He provides insightful details about their internship program and shares some helpful tips for all the employers.
GO-BIOexplorer 2016, company’s purposeful summer internship program, was designed to expose high quality and self-motivated youngsters to real problem-solving in an entrepreneurial setting while building the technology core of the company. The GO-BIOexplorers were selected from premier engineering institutes like IIT Delhi, IIT Roorkee, NID Ahmedabad, BITS Pilani, etc. Positions were advertised on Internshala website, and direct interaction with campus placement offices and applicants were the methods used to identify and select the finalists.
Our selection process:
22 highly inquisitive and curious minds were finally selected from more than 400 applicants in a process designed to test their self-motivation, curiosity, problem-solving, and grit. Applicants were asked to write a one-pager describing their problem-solving approach to any one problem area selected by them out of the nine chunked-down business problems that we were targeting to solve in that summer.
Applicants that took innovative yet relevant and real approaches to solving our problems were invited for the in-depth interview process, with me spending more than half an hour with each of the 60 shortlisted applicants. The selected interns worked with us for almost 3 months and achieved far more than our expectations by creating the GO-BIO Android App, operations technology stack, and curating plant knowledge base in that short period of time.
The first week of the program was dedicated to a formal training program to learn the GOBIO values, Indian gardening market, and our business strategy & operating plans. They were then formally trained in problem-solving methodology with a full-day experiential training in the renowned Design Thinking course from Stanford University’s Institute of Design. In the next 10 days, a free-flowing team exploration followed for 5 different but linked Android App modules with collective decision-making, writing structured design documents, and defining coding responsibilities. Interns then enthusiastically underwent the next six intensive and super-fun weeks of software designing, coding, and debugging. They learned a lot by working on different projects like App UI/UX design, Android SDK, Google Cloud VMs & App Engine, etc.
For the interns, the highlight of the program was undoubtedly the deep mentoring sessions on every Saturday afternoon conducted by the 11 accomplished global business leaders over the summer of 2016 like Mr. Tushar Kothari, M.D., Beehive Systems, Mr. Sanjay Jain, M.D., LMC Enterprises etc. They were invited to share their life’s learning with the interns in the free-flowing sessions of 4 to 6 hours followed by individual Q&A sessions.
Some pro-tips for our peers from our experience would be:
• Your excitement about your business opportunity is the best intern recruitment tool. Send your most fired-up people to interact with the youngsters and watch how they get you the most aligned and motivated interns!
• If possible, chunk-up assignments into separate projects and have the candidates bidding for the opportunity to get the one they prefer on their CV.
• Interns, most of whom are college students, generally lack teamwork and specific technical skills & knowledge required to get the job done. They also don’t have insights into the knowledge of your industry and customer needs. Before you start the real work, equip interns with these to get high productivity and zero heartburn all around.
• At most companies, interns get ignored by the top leaders. Set up a two-way street of regular public forums for them to interact and spend time together for learning and personal growth.
• Invite your top customers, suppliers, technology vendors, and business partners to interact with your interns and their projects. Both sides will love it!
Are you also looking to start an internship program for your company? Please post your requirements here.
