Companies and students love to interact and eventually there is going to be a shift in college recruiting from “postings, career fair booth, etc” to “engagements.” Engagements meaning case competitions, contests, short term projects, etc – while collecting/filtering these engagements as evaluation tools for when it comes time to make a hiring decision.
 
Companies will use engagement tools to recruit/evaluate/find students > create a talent pool/following > hire great students before they even have to do a traditional post.

I had a longer post written, but I deleted it. The shift is as simple (and as complicated) as what is written above.

What would happen if you allowed students a platform to pitch you an internship? Students pitch you instead of you pitching students.

Interns are cheap, low-risk hires. Period. What if instead of writing an internship position, student were able to write their own? If the student is smart, they know what they are great at, they know what you need, and they know what they can do. I think smart students do this out there, but I have never seen an internship application look like this:

Summer Internships
June 8 – July 31

(1) Tell us what you would do:
(2) Tell us how you would do it:
(3) Tell us what tools you would need to do it:

What would happen if this was on the internship section of your website? Would students pitch you? – The ones that love your business and want to help would. Would it produce results? – Absolutely, they set their own goals/projects which increases buy-in and enjoyment.

Get out of the way.

The Motley Fool has chosen Jarren Smith as the case competitionwinner! Jarren is completing his freshmen year at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Kara Chambers, the HR representative from The Motley Fool, said “We received some outstanding student submissions. After meeting with several managers throughout the company to discuss the submissions, we selected Jarren as the winner.”

Jarren proposed a newsletter that would target undergraduate college students. The elements of the proposal that stood out were the market analysis, content ideas (including simplification of company earnings and investment philosophy), portfolio tracking features, and price points.

Congratulations Jarren! View the Scoreboard here.

SnagFilms has chosen Isaiah Goodman (Washington and Lee University) as the winner of their case competition! If you haven’t seen “Haze” you can view it here. It is a very powerful film.

The highlight of Isaiah’s submission is the marketing strategy focusing on “campus connectors.”

Isaiah continues to dominate these cases. Visit the scoreboard.

How do you design an effective internship? The goal of any internship should be to (1) get things done and (2) evaluate the intern as a potential hire.

The typical dilemma that inhibits companies and managers from hiring interns: Interns take more time to manage than they are worth. The manager is always wondering, “what am I going to give my intern to do?” or “how should I manage my intern?” For a manager, this task can become very time consuming. The intern gets in the way as the manager is trying to “get things done.”

What to do? The answer isn’t to cut your internship program (they can be most valuable!), rather the answer is to design the internship correctly. Here is how I would design a 10 week summer internship: Give the intern 5 major projects. Have a daily, casual, check-in  meeting (no more that 10 minutes) with the intern each day at which time he/she tells you what he/she is doing. Then at the end of each two week project cycle meet with the intern for 2 hours, allowing him/her to present his/her work product.

This not only saves time for the manager, but  gives the intern freedom to produce, hopefully,  great and noted work.

“One top-notch engineer is worth 300 times or more than the average.”
“Google would rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist.”
- Alan Eustace, VP of Engineering at Google.  

““A great programmer is worth a hundred good ones.”
-Bill Gates, Microsoft

I understand if these quotes sound like fluff to you. What does this really mean? Seriously, do they really think this? The answer is yes. And here is an example of why: Gmail and Google News were both started by a single person. Think about the ROI of that hire. Great places go the extra mile to get great people, which is exactly why they continue to be great places.