Internship is an additional avenue we can use for securing pipeline for hiring, especially for junior placements for hard-to-fill positions.
Appropriate intern candidate is somebody who has good theoretical background (be it university and/or academy of some sort) but zero to little practical experience, and we will be reluctant to hire him junior because of this.
There is a dedicated budget allocated for interns for FY2021+ and there is work in progress to determine appropriate date for bulk hiring of interns accross devtools. Opening ad-hoc position outside of this window is also possible. Either way start with new hire request in jobvite.
Our approach has so far been posting a job description that has more general requirements about the job, based on the fact applicants won't have relevant practical experience in corporate environment but mostly academical, freelance or other industry experience.
We should be careful to craft the job ad in a way that supports those expectations. In this sense, it probably doesn't make sense to ask for specific competences that one could only develop after having worked on a similar job but instead focus on the skills that are required to develop those competences. (e.g. ability to program vs experience building apps).
If members of more than one team interview the same person, it is good idea to know which team has precedence, to avoid confusion and disputes if more than one team wants to hire the same person.
If we are interviewing in bulks, it is important to give each interviewee the same task and judge on similar traits so that objective comparison can be made afterwards. More hiring tips are availble here. https://github.com/telerik/k2/blob/master/docs/00_handbook/hiring.md
So far we have tried hiring the interns in bulk with the goal of starting at the same month. It is probably good idea to use the same approach when doing more broader effort accross devtools. This will allow us to scope the effort in a single month.
We also did ad-hoc hiring of interns once. It is a valid approach if the matter is urgent and the bulk hiring has already completed.
Since onboarding the intern will require significant commitment from the host team (especially if they are onboarding other team members) it may turn that the summer is too busy. Our current proposal based on major events and other devtools commitments is September.
The goal of the onboarding is to introduce the intern to all aspects of the team responsibilities and let them try and fail at things. Look at this as a preparation for successful trial should the person be hired. From our experience even if we are hiring somebody for front-end dev we would ask them to contribute to support, QA and other activities so that they get to know the team processes.
This is can be a great assignemnt for level 2 or senior person that hasn't have the opportunity to guide new team members yet.
Depends on your initial goal and whether you are targeting open position or this is a speculative iternship.
In cases where you have been onboarding the intern so that they have succesful entry into junior role that you already have posiiton for - you can proceed with hiring if all is good after month 5.
If this is a speculative internship we may seek appropriate positions in other parts of the company, or part away but let them know we will consider them in case there is opening in the future.
Practice shows that most likely because of attrition or business growth there will be a placement for the intern, if they are really good.
I am adding some comments about the candidates requirements and the hiring process . The ideal candidate should be highly motivated to learn and work , that is why a motivation letter and why he/she candidates is also very important part . Also, we can use this letter as 1 step before proceeding with the interviews and have interviews shorter than usual. We used this practice last time as there was a lot candidates (more than usual).
Also - perhaps we can consider 2 flavors of interns - QA intern and Dev interns ( combining dev+support positions). Or at least talk about such options on the interview.