Leveraging Bright Ideas
When Small Companies Need Great Interns
Large companies looking to hire interns have it easy. All they have to do is post a brief job description on their own website and college students will flock in. The difficult part is sifting the resumes, running them through various software programs that pick out those with relevant keywords for the positions.
What about the smaller companies? Usually posting on their own corporate website is not enough. They have to make additional efforts to go to job websites and career fairs in search for top talent, paid or unpaid.
BusinessWeek blogger John Tozzi, mentioned in his post “How to Find an Intern” internship hubs that connect small businesses to students. This easily allows them to tap into multiple databases. But what about proper assessment prospective interns? One of the things companies we spoke to find most essential in an intern is a genuine interest in the company and its brand. In this tough economic climate where internships are scarce, it’s become harder to distinguish students who are passionate about working for a particular brand from those who would go for any available opportunity.
We thought of a model that addresses this and would hopefully result in a perfect match between companies and interns. Instead of merely posting internships, we post competitions that lead to internships.
In these competitions, we post an actual problem faced by the company and students propose and present solutions to it. So, these are real-world challenges designed to help students build their resume and hone their research, strategy development and presentation skills.
By the end of the competition, selected winners would have already developed a good amount of knowledge about the company. They would be able to come up to speed fast and climb the learning curve quickly, as they’ve already familiarized themselves with the company.
We have great confidence in this new talent-search model. With Web 2.0 technologies, we believe it is the future of finding talent and a new use for crowdsourcing.
What about the smaller companies? Usually posting on their own corporate website is not enough. They have to make additional efforts to go to job websites and career fairs in search for top talent, paid or unpaid.
BusinessWeek blogger John Tozzi, mentioned in his post “How to Find an Intern” internship hubs that connect small businesses to students. This easily allows them to tap into multiple databases. But what about proper assessment prospective interns? One of the things companies we spoke to find most essential in an intern is a genuine interest in the company and its brand. In this tough economic climate where internships are scarce, it’s become harder to distinguish students who are passionate about working for a particular brand from those who would go for any available opportunity.
We thought of a model that addresses this and would hopefully result in a perfect match between companies and interns. Instead of merely posting internships, we post competitions that lead to internships.
In these competitions, we post an actual problem faced by the company and students propose and present solutions to it. So, these are real-world challenges designed to help students build their resume and hone their research, strategy development and presentation skills.
By the end of the competition, selected winners would have already developed a good amount of knowledge about the company. They would be able to come up to speed fast and climb the learning curve quickly, as they’ve already familiarized themselves with the company.
We have great confidence in this new talent-search model. With Web 2.0 technologies, we believe it is the future of finding talent and a new use for crowdsourcing.
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© 2010 Created by Dev Sathe.
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