The Intern Blog

Last Monday was the first ever War For Talent Conference. Hosted by Justin Bedecarre , a startup-centric real estate agent, turned conference guru and entrepreneur, War For Talent was one of the most unique and valuable recruiting events I have attended this year, mainly because panelists represented a cross section of Silicon Valley hackers and founders who had some very outside the box strategies on how to improve hiring.

The goal of the event was to address one of the biggest questions in tech – if Facebook, Google and other leading tech companies succeed by only hiring the best engineers, how does your no-name startup compete in what is now one of the most crowded hiring environments ever? The conference was fun, inspiring and a bit daunting to see just how many companies were trying to figure out how to crack the nut on hiring engineers.

Interviewing interns is lot different than interviewing full-time employees. Candidates have minimal experience and almost no track record, so figuring out whether or not an intern has the aptitude and professionalism to fit in at your company often feels like a game of cat and mouse. Still, you don’t need to use the force to pick the right interns, you just need to know what you are looking for and how to ask the right questions.

After speaking with thousands of employers here are 10 of our favorite internship interview questions.

This is a guest post by Software Advice HR Analyst Jennifer King.

For businesses, interns can be an invaluable addition to your team as they provide new skills and ideas to the organization. On the other hand, it can be challenging to manage and train a group of interns depending on how you structure your internship program.

For the internship to be valuable for both parties, businesses must be prepared to invest time in creating a meaningful learning experience for students.

In the following video, Andrew Maguire, CEO of InternMatch, and Larry Smith, founder and editor of SMITH Magazine, share their advice for establishing and fostering a valuable internship experience with tips for building a successful internship program.

Most of you know Alec Baldwin’s famous speech in Glengarry Glen Ross where he shares the golden rule of sales: “ABC: Always Be Closing.”
Even more so than sales, recruiting is a job where you need to be always on. 

If you’re not building a pipeline of candidates and promoting your brand, chances are that the rock star candidate you want to hire will slip through the cracks.

The same philosophy is true in the campus-recruiting world when hiring interns. The biggest companies with the deepest pockets (Microsoft for example) have massive university teams that make sure that no potential candidate is left unturned. In fact, Microsoft is so dedicated to the idea of always recruiting interns that they have a college recruiter responsible for every technical university in the country! At key campuses like University Illinois Urbana Champagne Microsoft is regularly on campus meeting with student groups and even taking them out to get free ice cream.

This past week, InternMatch took its first trip to SXSW, where I had the opportunity too-host a panel with Larry Smith of SMITH Magazine on interns for small businesses, nonprofits, and startups. We had a great turnout, and over the course of the hour it became clear that for most companies early in the internship program process, there...

Summer internships tend to be used as a resume builder, a stepping stone, and something to do for extra cash while waiting for the fall semester to roll around. Rarely do we think of them as able to change someone’s entire career path, and maybe this is causing us to miss out.  

Adam O’Neal is a biology major at University of California, Irvine and was trying to decide which facet of biology interested him most to further his education, neuro or genetic, when he stumbled upon an internship program in radio. Thinking this internship would make him stand out amongst the vast sea of medical school applicants; he applied. 12 weeks later he had not only completed the program but found his career path had taken a 180 with his sights now focused on radio.

Guest Post By Dave Olson, Community Marketing Director of HootSuite.com

Over 15 years running marketing and community teams I've sponsored dozens of internships and along the way, found future employees, ideal collaborators and even a few friends.  From these experiences, I’ve compiled key nuggets of wisdom to help your company reap quality contributions from an intern who truly enjoys their challenging work experience.

Remember: You can't spell INTERNET without INTERN. 

Each summer students travel across the country to start internships and begin getting a feel for what thenext stage of their life will look like. 

However, for many top positions, the fall is when the competition for finding the perfect internship gets started. Today, we wanted to highlight an employer who has an exceptional internship program, which recruits from day one of the school year. Get pumped!

The American Marketing Association currently has over 40,000 members nation-wide with over 76 professional chapters. While the Association caters to companies of all sizes, it provides a community for small and medium sized business owners to share ideas and advance their marketing goals.

InternMatch has found a growing number of these companies...

I see a lot of internship descriptions everyday (hundreds upon hundreds in total). While a lot of them are good (but not necessarily noteworthy), many of them are disorganized, thrown together or worse.  In talking with students one of the biggest turn offs is positions written in all CAPS saying something along the lines of Come intern at...