When recruiting interns remember, you can’t fake being “cool.”

Posted by Jim Stroud

June 8, 2006

VERY interesting post from a former-Amazonian.

Here is a snippet from “Stevey’s Drunken Blog Rants…”

A UW student I just interviewed told me that his friend did an Intel internship this summer, and hated it so much that he turned down a fairly lucrative full-time offer from them. The friend said he’s convinced that an Intel employee wrote the screenplay for the movie Office Space. Not only do people there have 5 or 6 bosses to report to, which is bad enough; they actually have TPS reports, and everyone has to do them. And when they change the cover page format, a memo goes out letting everyone know.

Although that’s probably one of the more surreal internship experiences I’ve heard about, internship horror-stories are fairly common. And it’s not as if the intern doesn’t tell anyone back at school. Word gets around fast. Many companies have effectively blacklisted themselves at major universities. The UW student who told me the story says that now nobody in the the CS department is interested in working at Intel. Intel is still recruiting like mad on campus, but they’ve effectively closed the pipeline.

So be nice to your interns. At least let ‘em use the old TPS cover-page format.

The real lesson is that you can’t hide problems with your company. You can market yourself as a fun and interesting and dynamic company, but if you’re not, people will find out. They’ll tell their friends, and you’ll be out of the running for a long time.

If we make a full-time offer to an intern, and they decline in favor of another company’s offer, someone here has screwed up. I know I’ve done it. The intern may say it’s the money, or it’s the location, or whatever. But that’s not how interns make their decisions. They decide based on the quality of the work and the quality of the team they’re working with. They’re looking for a community to bond with, and if they go somewhere else, it means they found a better community. The other company did a better sell-job.

READ: Google’s Secret Weapon

TAGS: recruiting, hr, employment, blogs