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How To Hire Interns For Your AI Startup
Transcript
[00:00] I currently run and operate the software company bump UPS if you found yourself on this video this is part of a multi-part series where I go over every single step and I show you everything you need to know when it comes to hiring unpaid interns today's topic we're going to go over interviews and the entire interviewing process and vetting relevant candidates for your company which means we have already done lesson one so bye-bye sourcing and if you want to check that out I'll leave you in the description down below click that lesson or just click the playlist watch lesson one because in today's lesson we're going to do everything we need to know
[00:30] when it comes to interviews test vetting Excel sheets Google Dax everything You' ever want to know sound good let's jump in welcome back y'all or hello again if you're watching the longer version of this series today's video we're going to be going over interviews and I have a ton of free resources when it comes to this I'll make sure as always to leave all this in the description down below a simple little link click to email templates intern data Excel sheets test everything so here we go as we learned in lesson one from sourcing here we now know how to just get candidates to apply
[01:02] for the job we know how to set up a brand presence set up a good job listing and just get some flow there once we've done this this leads to the next stage here which will be the Google sheet you create to start tracking the entire process within your Google Drive you should be creating like a meta folder called like internship sop standard operating procedures that you're going to reuse for every single program you run this is extremely useful as a lot of the ways we go about hiring interns and sourcing interns is the exact same way just a different day different month
[01:33] different year therefore really nice once you do the heavy lifting of setting up all this the process of actually hiring the next intern is extremely easy so what do we need to identify during the vetting stage of an intern I went ahead and just put in an example person that applied who is this person it's me so the first relevant thing since we're sourcing from LinkedIn is provide the individuals LinkedIn Euro so for me Corbin here is Corbin once you have that the next most relevant piece of data you want to provide is going to be the email so this
[02:05] is going to be the email that you see within their resume typically you copy it you paste it over now gets into the more free form stage of however you want to structure your company for us what we do typically is the first stage is obviously the individual needs to apply the second stage is going to be a form they need to fill out and then the third stage is going to be a meeting they have with you going over a test asking questions therefore let's go over the very first thing we do once we put in the individual's information we need to reach out to them the way we're
[02:36] structuring this key here is why means yes I've already done it yes they've already F out a form yes first round is offered Etc obviously at any point during this interview process if they don't do one of these or it's not offered Etc you just put n for no now that we know this let's check out the email templates as we saw here for the First Column of C email sent which email is this Corbin this is the one we send just right off the the bat very first email of contact of course these will be in the description down below so that's all good I went ahead and did most of the heavy lifting for you so make sure
[03:07] to leave a like if you feel like you learned something all you need to do is simply put in the relevant variables that is relevant to your company and obviously you don't even need to use this template just do whatever heck you want to do typically when you do first emails or emails in this process they're very concise very to the point don't send essays that are MLA formatted okay no citation just get to the point of what you're trying to get across so this very first email here is the point obviously we need to put our company name in the subject line so there's relevancy for the individual that applied like oh yeah I remember applying for bump UPS next in the email itself
[03:38] you want to identify the position that they applied for so it reminds them like oh yeah I did apply for the backend engineering role at bump UPS the second most important thing you want to do is provide a Google form link which we're going to go over pretty soon here but this essentially is our first gut check what this Google form link poses as is two major things one a way for us to gather more information on our candidate but two and most importantly number two here see if they even fill it out the reason that's important is that your first phase when vetting interns you
[04:10] don't want to just jump in the call with them right away because you could be wasting both of your time if you send out a 100 intern emails this introductionary email and only 10 fill out the form then perfect you've just narrowed down your potential class by 90% we'll go ahead and dive a little bit more about what this form should entail but from here the next thing you should add is a deadline give x amount of days of when you should expect this form to be filled by if you don't put this in the email you leave it to open-ended who knows when you'll get the form responded
[04:41] by it might be 3 months from now and you're just like wait wait this whole intern program already started what are the typical amount of days you should give here 7 to 10 days probably to give a little bit of leeway so this is the first email you send out and obviously little Pro tip here you have like 20 interns you're sending this email to copy all the emails from this Callum put it as a BCC so individuals don't see everyone in the email chain so let's go ahead and jump over to this Google form link I'll see about publishing this form so you can just kind of copy some of the questions if you want to so the situation here is very simple right and
[05:11] end of the day like a lot of the resources I'm going to share with you during this entire vetting process they're all basically going to be free that's part of the advantages of just using Google's ecosystem or Microsoft's ecosystem having the ability to create a Google doc or Google sheet for free is really nice from here your banner is just going to be whatever you put on your LinkedIn typically so just throw it up there just some branding the reason I showed this one for this example one is these little candies remind me a lot of zow you know Mike and I zour have you ever had those before those are amazing for some reason they did away with them
[05:42] having a little powder on it I used to really like that powder so I don't know what happened to that powder keep it concise keep it clean position name they applied for company short description hey here is the form fill this out from bump ups.com therefore for each role you do you'll have a separate Google form so if I'm hiring for three separate types of position then I would have three separate Google forms first relevant thing we need to add here is obviously their email address contact information and typically we can cross reference that email address with the Google sheet here next thing will be their full name
[06:13] third thing will be the LinkedIn uro and the reason we're doing the LinkedIn URL is that sometimes individuals that apply for this will use a different email address than what we have on our record therefore it's just nice to have very very clear indication that LinkedIn URL this is who you are this is how we proceed the next question you should ask is are they even available for the dates a lot of times you may have interns or individuals that apply for a position without reading too much into it and realize wait wait I can't do a 12we program therefore they will just be vetted out of the entire cycle so for
[06:44] here are you available for a 12v program from X tox this would be from month to month EG January to April some interns might say other where they are available for most of dates but there's certain weekends or weeks they can't do that's up to your discretion past that following this the next question you should ask is going to be how many hours they can dedicate to the underlying internship so those are evergreen questions that we can use for every single form we ever create in the context of interns but then the next three questions are however many this is just an uncapped amount of questions typically don't do too many cuz too many
[07:15] no one likes filling out long forms okay if it's too long then it's just like what am I doing but typically you're just going to ask very intern specific questions for the rule they're trying to do so I just put placeholders here idea being for example let's say we go from lesson one here if the social media marketing in turn a very relevant question here could be a multi checkbox saying what platforms have you created content on or are most comfortable with and then just give them a list of all social media platforms this is like your first way of gut checking like does this individual show some expertise or some knowledge in the direction we want to
[07:46] take this role so once you have your intern specific questions to the role that they're applying for the last two questions can be applied across the form the big one being what motivates you to even do Exposition at your company you'll be surprised here as some people are really really ecstatic or really really motivated to work in the specific industry your company's in like the best way to work I guess this might be a life lesson is just work on things you actually enjoy so you can typically gauge whether or not the position they're applying for would they actually enjoy that kind of work and then finally
[08:17] just an open-ended question these are pretty standardized here where is there anything else you would like us to know this is not required I just like putting it there so then that brings us to the filled form column So in theory we have 20 different emails here for 20 different candidates we put why for all of them cuz you know we sent them all and then after that the first vetting really URS what you'll notice is that every single person that applies is not going to fill out that form if they do fill out the form here's the next step when we put why for confirmation that hey they filled out the form let us know
[08:48] and then two is going to be the form notes before I dive into form notes Let me just outline two other things about this Google sheet here first thing intern data XX this is kind of like January to April put put in the 12we program months and then y y why is not why but the year that this is incurring because in reality if you're doing cycles and doing intern programs that are on a quarterly basis then you're going to have a ton of these little Excel sheets or Google Sheets therefore it's nice to have this longterm for tracking second little tip here is that if you're hiring from multiple rows
[09:19] you're kind of incentivized to basically copy this entire template here and just create it as a new sheet rather than having every single role be put into the same one so we got position one here you would add another one for like position two and whatever the name is for that so now we get into form notes what are the form notes what we like to do is give a score out of 10 so is this candidate based off the information they provided in that form do we deem them a seven an eight a nine or a perfect 10 out of 10 so we can just be like you know what Corman your answers are pretty good I like it n out of 10 from there and then
[09:50] in Brackets notes just jot down little things you remember from that form so when you're looking at like 10 different candidates that all filled out the form first you can look at the score and second you can look at your little notes that you write about that form that stood out to you this just helps with the next part of this phase here which is first round offer so assuming you like the candidate you like the information they put you can go ahead and offer the first round with a Y but before we do that sometimes when it comes to filling out forms and giving deadlines you can do a reminder email as
[10:21] well if you choose to do so so within the Google Doc I provide for templates I went ahead and just put a reminder email as well so this is under the assumption that the individual will receive the first offer email hasn't filled out the form in 6 days and you kind of just want to send a reminder like hey by the way this is what's happening same situation here put in your relevant information for the variables provided and then one really big difference though is a deadline date rather than like a suggested amount of days to fill as we did in the first email a deadline date is very much like January 27th 2025 this
[10:54] is it if you fill past this no perfect once we want to offer them though let's say we're past the form phase and what you'll notice is from our experience here we'll notice that if we have a candidate pull of let's just hypothetically say we had a candidate pool of 100 just to make it easy like the math easy you're going to be looking at around a 20 to 30% conversion rate 70% of individuals that apply for the offering are probably just applying in mass and then they might forget your company they might find a better opportunity Etc this is good though as
[11:25] we're not wasting either of our time you sending out that first email and just being like are you even able to fill out a form and if they're not that's good they didn't get to the second stage here which will be a live inperson call another way of looking at it as well is that if they weren't even willing to fill out the form if they did get enrolled in your program they 100% probably wouldn't be willing to do the work associated with an internship for your company so for this column when I say first round offer that's when we're sending the email to the people that passed the first phase which I added the template here as well same situation
[11:56] here make sure you send it to the correct email for whoever passed that stage put in your relevant variables of your company here the only thing that changes here is now we're on to phase two here which we're going to provide a scheduling link there are different ways to approach this you could use calendar Le kaidi Cal Etc I would suggest checking out tidy Cal and the only reason I say that is yes with a calendly free subscription you could probably do what you need to do the reason I like tidy Cal is that this isn't a subscription based service where you're going to charge like $10 or $20 a month
[12:28] it's like a license so I think I just paid I don't remember the exact am I think it was like 60 bucks maybe 100 I forgot what it was but basically I have access to tidy account software for life and I never have to pay an additional dollar ever again if I ever want to schedule a meeting I like that kind of logic better than me spending $10 a month on calendar Le and feeling stuck for years so that's a good cost effective alternative for your company is using a software like tidy Cal that you can just buy out and never pay a subscription fee so once you send this email you will then start getting conversions on people actually
[12:59] scheduling meetings with you and that's where column G comes into play where you're going to Simply put why for yes they scheduled a meeting and no if they never schedule a meeting conversion rate on this is you're looking at a coin flip so if we go all the way down to 20 candidates that passed the first phase you send out this scheduling link probably 10 are going to convert maybe eight so once you have the individuals that converted on this stage now you're about to jump into a meeting live with the individual so here is how you carry yourself in an interview call with a potential candidate it first thing to
[13:30] note is have a test ready so whatever your role that you are having the person fulfill have a small test you can do live in the call so I'll give two examples on this if you're watching this and you're a software company you're going to like this one but use something like repet you can do this for free rep.com create a repet for a very small test for whatever you're doing I'm not going to dive too deep into this one because this is quite literally the front-end test for our Engineers here the idea is simply set up a environment where the individual can code live in
[14:01] front of you and you can interact with them and have like task one task two for example task one could be make this page Mobile responsive on this specific component of the footer item whatever it may be rep's nice because you can reuse this test across all front end interns and proceed in that manner let's say you're not a software company though and you want to test a different type of role for example social media marketing which we did here as well these kind of tests are very much industry specific on what you really see as valuable to what
[14:31] potentially could be enrolled in your company so for the social media marketing test that we did here at bump UPS all I really did was created Google doc called it like intern test social media during the call I shared the doc with the person I was interviewing and then the specific test in that context was I gave them 10 headlines and it said which ones would you use with our software assuming that each headline had a video Associated and essentially the best way to what we call newsjacking in the industry where you put your software
[15:02] plus headline that's trending and get traffic that way that was my test share the dock went over kind of saw how they were thinking mentally When approaching that problem whatever your test is make sure one make sure you have a test don't just BL fair this entire interview process if this person wants to work for you and you going to be a part of your company for 12 weeks give him some type of test whatever it may be make sure it's very simple provide an email share a doc provide an email share XYZ go over a little phase little test have
[15:32] follow-up questions understand what you're looking for understand the way the candidate would approach problems because a lot of times in business it's how good of a problem solver you are but more importantly especially in the context of a remote role working for your business you want to understand how they would think through the process of solving that problem with little to no advice or influence from you yourself obviously during the actual intern program you will guide The Intern of the best ways and best practices to approach that problem you want to see how they
[16:02] operate on just here's a problem what are you going to do I kind of jumped ahead there but let me go ahead and just break down how an interview should look so I'm going to do this and we're going to go ahead and just say this is the interview length when testing for more technical positions like front end or backend you're looking at an interview timeline between 30 minutes to an hour to fully understand if the individual is capable in reality though any type of structuring of an interview the latter half of the interview should be the test which means that the first part of the interview is you understanding who the person is more typically the way I like
[16:33] structuring this is let's say they applied for the social media role ask questions relevant to the role so for example social media what past experiences do you have managing other company social media accounts have you ever created content yourself what are ways or strategies that you've used in the past in content creation for this part we're very much leaning into what they've done in the past to get insight of what they could possibly do in the future one big lesson I learned from this part and then this part will typically sometimes carry over to the end of the test as well is you can start picking away and really understanding
[17:05] what the interns and individuals's passion is this is important as I have had interviews where the first phase was a little bit surface level when they were telling their story and their experiences we went through the test together and then we re-entered that conversation we had here with their past experiences again and they just dived way deeper into it and got me like way more context and when they were talking about it you can see how enthusiastic they were about it and how much passion they had around it which honestly now that I'm saying it so much that's a huge green flag when in the interview process
[17:35] do they seem like they have passion for it or does this seem like routine to them like they're just jumping in a call to jump in a call this comes with experience but from what I've seen up to this point interns that show passion in a call will perform better in the actual internship opportunity I mean it makes sense like if you ever went to school or college you'll know that like there is like maybe a class that you don't really like so you're just kind of like I don't really like this class so I'm just kind of lay back a little but if you really do like a class like you're super enthralled with it you go that extra 100 miles from here is up to your company's
[18:06] discretion some companies when it comes to technical interviews will do multiple rounds so you could have a first round a second round a third round but if you feel like for that specific role one interview is enough and that is sufficient then the next step here is this we're going to do first round notes so we're going to do the same thing we're going to give a score again so out of that entire interview what would you give it a 6 out of 10 7 out of 10 a 10 out of 10 and instead of just writing notes like this what we're going to use is we're going to leverage a feature within Google sheet that's going to make the whole UI in formatting a lot better
[18:37] so what I like to do is just rightclick this and then scroll down to comment and then I'll put all my notes that I got from that interview and everything I should know about that individual uh important things that you should know within interviews is time zone so typically I like to ask like what time zone would you be within the beginning of this internship so I can understand contextually setting up me but you're just leaving a ton of stuff here you're leaving how they performed in the test past experiences what they seem to be interested in everything like that and this is that's the great part about
[19:08] comments here is that you can just write a ton so and once you're done you can hit comment here and check it out again so make sure I delete this because I'm sharing this template and then finally the last stage here is offering them sadly Corbin here he went through the entire process we're not offering it which this process when offering an intern a position at your company is going to require a whole separate video which will be offer letters everything associated with the initial process of
[19:38] actually giving a person the opportunity to work at your company it goes without saying that when structuring these Google Sheets like let's say they filled out the form you don't offer the first round command V okay no there and then typically what you like to do is like move the rows around where the people that are going farther and farther in the process or just higher up on the sheet another piece of Insider knowledge here is that sometimes you have to do multiple batches so let's say you do one batch where you put out one job listing you get 500 candidates through the entire vetting process you know you're coming down to the end here and then somehow you only end up with like two
[20:09] people that are basically ready to get offered it there is no harm unless you're very near your start date to do a second batch Source more interns and put them through this pipeline again now you know how to start interviewing your interns I could probably make a video that is much more in depth and even maybe give like a fake call of how an interview should go so let me know if you want to see that in the comments down below you already know what's next what's next Corbin offer letters so in this video I'll show you if you put a y there for yes if you're offering the position the standard operating procedure of how to proceed past that
[20:40] but for now you successfully learned how to interview unpaid interns at your company I'll see you in the next video time to interview two random videos that's my face I'll see you in the next video