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Interviewing & Hiring

(Part 3 of a summer-long blog series by Entrustet co-founder Jesse Davis)

In this, part 3 of the series, I’d like to discuss the interviewing & hiring process. The first step in this process is finding potential interns, which I covered in the first post of this series.

Interviewing & Hiring

I’ll start this off by saying that my advice on interviewing & hiring, as well as with any other topic we cover, is just my personal take on things, and by no means will it work in every situation for every entrepreneur. Like with anything else, every entrepreneur ultimately needs to find their own personal approach and do whatever feels most comfortable to them.

Choosing who gets an interview

I felt very strongly that we offer an interview to everyone who applied. Most employers will look at resumes and choose only those candidates who appear most qualified for the position. I agree that in some cases for certain positions it makes sense to be sure an intern has a particular skill set. For instance, you wouldn’t want to hire a someone to do website work for you if they don’t have any experience with the programming language your site is written in. But generally speaking, I see problems with the approach of disapproving any candidate based solely on their resume.

1. You’re hiring a person, not a resume.

2. Resumes are deceiving. My issue with resumes is that the person writing it is writing it to try and impress someone else instead of writing it in a way that expresses their true personality and individual strengths. For instance, someone may have a really underwhelming resume–2.0 GPA, no extracurriculars, etc. but may have left out the fact that they worked the graveyard shift at their last job (shows determination and commitment) and write poetry in their free time (shows creativity). They may have left these things out because they’re not “impressive resume builders,” but I kind of think these things are just as important, if not more important, than what’s traditionally considered to look impressive on a resume.

3. School doesn’t = real world. Sometimes I think there’s such a thing as being brainwashed by school. For instance, writing a term paper is not how you want to write blog articles or emails. I’d rather have someone who can adapt their writing style to the real world than someone who’s set in their school ways. There are many more examples than just writing, but I’ve just personally seen this several times with regards to writing.

4. Everyone brings something to the table, it’s just a matter of figuring out what it is and harnessing it. I’ve found that if you are willing to listen and work with interns closely, you’ll stumble upon something they do as well or better than anyone else you know. It may be something as menial as being able to enter contacts into your contact management system faster than anyone else. But regardless of the skill, it’s there if you look hard enough. Find it and harness it.

5. Experience may be important in hiring a full-time paid position, but gaining experience is the whole point of summer internships. When I was 16 or so I applied for a part-time job at Starbucks. They said they needed a barista with experience. I understand that, but like, if every place requires people with experience, then how the hell does someone go about getting experience in the first place?

How to conduct an interview

I guess our interviews were nothing like traditional interviews, so if you’re looking for advice on how to conduct a traditional corporate interview, then you’ve come to the wrong blog. The interns are working with me, not for me, so the idea of an interview where I ask questions like “what’s your biggest strength and weakness,” or questions designed to analyze their quantitative reasoning skills wasn’t going to work. Plus, I feel like I’m more likely to get a good gut feeling about someone in the context of a casual conversation than in the question and answer style.

So we started each interview by demoing the website and explaining our company from the inside out. (The unintended benefit from this exercise was that being forced to explain our services and operations 30+ times in a few weeks time was great practice for pitching the company). I encouraged them to ask questions throughout, and noticed that the ones asking good questions were the ones who really grasped everything I was saying. Then I explained the four intern groups we would have for the summer–finance/business dev, social media/PR, sales, and corporate relations, and asked what one they’d be interested in.

Some things to consider for interviewing:

• Get them interested in your company. You’re already at a disadvantage for getting good talent because of the fact that the internship is unpaid. Make up for it by getting the intern intrigued by what you’re startup is up to.
• Ask them to tell you about their interests and what they’re hoping to get from the intern experience.
• Get an idea of the amount of time they have to devote to the internship. I’d recommend each intern have at least 10 hours a week to work, or else it may be difficult to ever get into a good work rhythm.

Choosing who to hire

I felt strongly that we would offer the internship to any of them who wanted it. This could have backfired big time–we gave out over 30 interviews. Luckily, though, exactly 10 out of the 30+ who interviewed accepted the job, which was the number of people we’d hoped for. But this open-invitation method may not work for you, which is fine. In that case, I recommend considering the following things when making hiring decisions:

• Is the candidate someone you’d like to work with? I find it more important to cultivate a happy atmosphere in the office than to focus on creating a hardworking one. I believe that if a fun and creative culture is in place, the hardworking aspect will develop as an organic offshoot of the happy atmosphere. That said, recognize your particular company’s culture, and consider if each candidate is someone who will support or decay it.
• Did any red flags come up in the interview? If the candidate said something particularly inappropriate, you may want to trust your gut and proceed with caution on hiring.
• Does this candidate seem flexible and open to ambiguity? The amount and types of work to to be done varies greatly from day to day in a startup, so it’s helpful if the intern seems cool with the fact that their workload will be rather unpredictable at times.
• How genuinely interested is the candidate in the company?
• When you were interviewing the candidate and explaining the company, did he/she seem to “get it?”

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Next up, part 4 of the series: Legalities of Unpaid Internships

Tags:

Intern Program Tips · internship program · startup intern programs · startup interns