Lesson 1 - Sourcing Talent
How To Hire Interns For Your AI Startup📅 2025-02-23
Transcript
[00:00] I currently run and manage an AI software company called bump UPS the video you just found yourself on is going to be a multi-part series showing you everything you need to know step by step when it comes to hiring unpaid interns this first video is going to go over sourcing how do we find relevant candidates to fill these positions interviews how do we vet relevant candidates to make sure they're a good fit for our company following this will be offer letters and other prerequisite information you need to provide the relevant candidate legal contract every
[00:30] single legal contract you will need in order to hire unpaid interns just as a little side note when it comes to hiring unpaid interns comparative to hiring a paid employee there's actually less legal implications around unpaid internships and then the final part of the series will be onboarding this entire series I will also include relevant templates for free it's going to be like Google Drive links you can click in the description down below and get access to if that all sounds good the skills I'm going to show you in this video can apply to any company in any context regardless if it's a software company so let's go ahead and jump in
[01:02] welcome back y'all today's video part of this big playlist and then as you already know from my channel we're going to make this one big video as well we're going to go over sourcing and we're going to go over two relevant things we need to ensure we do to make sure we get quality candidates and obviously get the ball rolling and start a journey towards interns that are unpaid for employment two major things to point out before we jump any further in this series this entire series is going to be for the focus of sourcing vetting and getting unpaid interns within your company which means I'm going to be creating a whole separate playlist for the actual
[01:33] management of interns in this context now these videos are going to be skewed towards software and software companies but obviously the steps and everything you're about to learn in these videos could be applied to any type of company specifically when it comes to hiring unpaid interns this is very much an evergreen situation here where the logic and the standard operating procedures can be applied to any type of business when it comes to management and that side of the entire playlist that's going to be a little bit more hyperfocused on software teams for now though let's do it you're like Corin why are you talking so much I got to give context y'all okay
[02:04] let's jump in Step One create a LinkedIn profile yes you could do other platforms like indeed or whatever exists nowadays but I suggest you just do LinkedIn especially if you are sourcing for software developers to be part of your internship program what makes a good LinkedIn profile a couple of things first thing obviously have a aesthetically pleasing Banner typically just treat this like a YouTube page or an X page where you're trying to get across the main idea of what your company does therefore anyone that could potentially become your intern or is interested in the company gets an idea
[02:36] right away of what the heck's going on the name bump UPS is obviously a little ambiguous but then you come to a profile and you're like chat with videos for anything oh okay so this software chats with videos for anything how use that second major thing you should make sure you have is a overview of what the heck your company even is and I'm realizing what I'll do is I'll actually leave a link to bump UPS LinkedIn in the description down below so you can check it out see to what up but the idea behind the overview should be very short very brief typically what you want to find in this is year founded 2024 2025
[03:07] context of your overall company Mission and a little bit of an idea of the value you provide your end consumer so for this founded in 20123 Dallas Texas two technical Founders the mission to revolutionize the way we interact with video content and then obviously a little bit of what the value is that we provide such as questions get summaries Etc so first part is branding understanding within 5 Seconds of coming to this page what your company does second part is giving a little bit more context of your company and the third
[03:39] part which I think is missed by a lot of companies or at least startups is a post describing who you even are why is a post like this relevant and important to actually sourcing quality interns here are three major reasons why first one trust why would anybody apply for your internship if they don't even know who the heck is running the company who they are what they do Etc especially if you are a startup or kind of a no offense no-name company like right now people don't really know who you are like bump UPS most people don't even know what a bump up is then you are highly
[04:11] incentivized to build trust right away therefore your first post you got to put a profile pick you're going to put context of who am I going to be working for if I actually sign up for this internship now the post itself can just be more context of the company how it operates everything around it I think the most valuable thing about this post is the fact that one it's it's Evergreen that's always nice you do it one time you don't have to worry again it's just up but two it gives your company character the amount of LinkedIn profiles and Linkedin business profiles I've seen that don't have a post like
[04:42] this and it's kind of just like a block of text and they're posting job applications for people to apply to is like who am I working for what is this therefore create a post like this if you're like Corbin I don't know how to design like that it it's not too deep but just use a software like canva something simple logo face maybe somewhere cool proceed the next part of this video is I'm going to go over job posting as that's what's going to actually lead to people even finding out who you are and applying for the position before I do that I want to point out real quickly which might be some industry specific knowledge you're not aware of what I noticed when we did
[05:13] our first job listings and postings I mean let me know where your industry is and what your company does because maybe this is just a unanimous thing across different companies and and job position types but what I can say with 100% certainty comparative to all the different listings we had open which was front end back prompt engineering and social media marketing we saw an insane amount of conversion rate and demand for backend positions like a lot like I'm talking when we did the job posting overnight we woke up to over 800 applicants the
[05:45] reason I bring this up is one a lot of people are looking for work that's obvious but the second one is more on the follower account you see there we did no paid ads in order to increase that follower account what we actually noticed was that when you do job postings it just creates this kind of relationship where where an individual will apply to the job and also follow the company's profiles page as well so we got a th000 followers I think it's like 1,300 within like two weeks not that that matters obviously but keep that in mind so you have your profile set up you're good to go you're like what's
[06:17] next Corbin the next thing is going to be creating your job listing so I'm going to leave this in the description down below this is kind of a template of how to approach a job listing what we're going to do is we're going to walk through a real job listing we did for bump ups but for now let me just explain this Google doc a little with every job listing what you'll notice is that there's going to be a general about XYZ company this right here the purpose of the serves is just you got to give context of who the heck you are because a lot of times anyone that's searching for an internship that's unpaid they won't even know 90% of the company's names but even beyond that Google and other big companies does this anyways
[06:48] what's great is that you've kind of already created this with your LinkedIn profile page like that little overview you can just put right there next is going to be perks and benefits that are kind of ubiquitous across your different job listings like no matter what these are probably going to show up so you might as well keep them here for example if this is an unpaid internship the value the intern receives is the mentorship and the experience so obviously mentorship opportunities is going to be one of the points here the typical job posting template is going to be that General text that you saw above there and then the what you'll do and what you'll need to succeed I'll make sure to leave this Doc in the
[07:19] description down below for free you already know how it is make sure to leave a like if you've already feel like you learn something let's jump to a posting so the way LinkedIn works is that you are kind of put in a position where you have to pay at a certain point in reality for this $64 we really didn't need to spend this but the way LinkedIn works with postings is that after you receive 10 applicants it requires you to put in like some type of marketing budget for $7 a day now this specific listing is for social media manager intern the reason I'm showing this one rather than like a backend or front-end
[07:50] engineering job listing because of the fact I want to make this series more like General so any company can watch it and as a side note if you want to see the formatting and the stuff we said in our listings this this is all just public information just look up bump UPS job listing back in engineer here we go here's structuring first major important thing to do notice the title of the underlying job opportunity it's the job opportunity intern unpaid this parenthesis and unpaid in the title of the job 100% put that and the reason we
[08:21] do that is you don't want people applying for a job they think they're about to get paid for because now we're wasting both of our times if they possibly get later on in the vetting process so just put it in people's faces this is the situation it's unpaid and we reinforce this by putting employment type internship as well when you set up and create this job listing let me know in the comments if you want me to show you how to create a job listing it's pretty simple stuff here like drag and drop type type type Etc the job description the very first sentence should outline time commitment now when
[08:53] it comes to unpaid internships you can structure this however you want but in reality you don't want this ambiguous people that choose to do unpaid internships want to get as much value as possible for their experience therefore if you leave it ambiguous like it will'll hire you we don't really know what's going on like maybe in six months we'll finish this internship is no good your first sentence should be the duration of your program so I bump UPS it's a 12we program from January to April that's how we do our internship classes within our software company so that means that our next 12we program
[09:25] will happen this summer keep it consistent keep it finite there's a little bit of a cavey out there when it comes to a 12we program where if you see an intern that performs very well you can have another conversation maybe extend the program that is a topic for the videos later on in this playlist but keep that in mind following this about your company name website link company name for recognition website link for hey I found this job listing this kind of looks cool let me just go to the website and see if I even like this company in a way of like you go to the
[09:55] website and it looks like 2004 like a like the UI just like what are we doing here is it just built on HTML CSS nothing else some people will just be like okay I don't want to work here but if you go to like I don't know maybe like bump UPS like okay this is cool this is cool next the general overview of your company this is going to be a Evergreen type of text that you can use throughout all job listings so that shows up right here boom don't write out essays there like a lot of people that are applying for internships they're not going to want to read essays like just say what your company does as fast as possible in the shortest amount of Words
[10:27] which then leads into the next part of the temp template that I described which is the what will you do and what will you need to succeed here are two things you can know about this part first thing if you're completely lost you're like Corman I have no clue what to put there look at other job postings in your industry that are similar to what you want and just kind of get an idea of what is to be expected but in reality if you do know what you want then this should be very easy format it in bullet points more legible and essentially just put in a very general idea of what the position entails so like for example
[10:58] part of what the social media team will be doing here at bump UPS will be assist in creating social media agendas planning schedule post to align with project goals and audience engagement strategies now what is extremely important for you to note here is that whatever you outline of what they will do the whole purpose of an unpaid internship is you're going to teach them the most effective way of approaching that piece of Labor therefore for the interns that are joining our current class here we're going to show them Insider strategies that we use at bump ups for social media engagement by Yours Truly scrolling all the way down here though we're going to end with perk and
[11:29] benefits these are fast and just advantages of working with your specific company compared to all the rest so some examples are mentorship opportunities Innovative technology one extremely important thing for you to know and I want to just give a real quick disclaimer I am not a lawyer I never took the bar so take it with a grain of salt but never ever say you will compensate in any way when it comes to money or gifts that is just off limits sadly if you have an unpaid intern that's worked for you for 12 weeks you can't give them a shirt like I can't
[12:00] give my interns a bump up shirt for free because then that to the government and the court system is deemed as a way of compensation so keep that in mind sadly there is no free swag you can give your interns perfect once you do that hit submit and you're live now here are some context of how long it took us to Source interns for our different positions for backend and front end this was just eye opening it took two to three days max for us to get hundreds of applicants and high quality applicants at that so that
[12:31] was that situation social media marketing there was obviously a lot less applicants that applied but this little situation here is we ran a first go and a second go just to kind of test some logic within the underlying description of our posting EG like before we didn't have the 12we program and we realize by adding Clarity on the time commitment actually led to a higher conversion rate the 880 applicants found here were within two days that covers sourcing what you'll notice is once you put the job listings out you'll get more followers on your business page on top of that you'll start being able to vet
[13:01] through different applicants which will then lead into the next stage here which will be interviews interviews the way you want to approach this is really up to your discretion in this next video I'll show you essentially how we approached it in reality for you to list a new class it's going to be part of a big program looking at probably a month worth of work associated with all this between timelines delays contracts being signed interviews being done taking the time to actually look over the candidate and understand whether they'll be be a fit or not ton of stuff entailed but it's worth it so without further Ado
[13:33] I'll see you in the next video unpaid interns two random videos that's my face I'll see you in the next video