So we hired 3 interns in January, for a 4 month coop: Malini from Waterloo, Daniel from ÉTS and Maxime from Sherbrooke University. We weren’t sure what the response would be to an apprentice ninja posting from a brand new, completely unknown startup. Back in November/December when we posted those jobs, we didn’t even have a blog, all we had was a bare website announcing something would come.

The response from Waterloo was a good surprise: we had somewhere around 40 applications. And the quality was there, too: we selected about 10 students that we wanted to meet in an interview. Of those there were probably 2 or 3 that we would have liked to work with, and one clearly stood out, and she accepted the job. A couple more students were very interesting, but their english was really not at a sufficient level. We don’t require a stellar handle of the english language, but do need to be able to converse with them pretty easily, and that they understand what’s going on.

Looking for interns

We also posted the job at many universities around here: McGill, Concordia, Polytechnique, USherbrooke, ÉTS. The response was the same from all 4: an itsy bitsy teeny tiny trickle of CVs. Less than 5 from each, quality greatly lacking from most. The only ones we wanted to meet were Daniel and Maxime. Fortunately, they both impressed us and we made them an offer, which they thankfully accepted.

All 3 are doing wonderfully well.

But why the discrepancy in the responses???

­ This time around, we have a website with a blog and pretty (and not so pretty) pictures and we’re starting to make ourselves known. We also have a larger team, and existing interns who can vouch for us. So we thought the local response would be better, but so far, no good. 4 applications from ÉTS, 1 of which we want to meet, and we’ve seen 1 from McGill that we want to meet out of something like 3 or 4 applications. We have yet to receive the applications from USherb, Polytechnique, Concordia.

That’s the other problem: scheduling. The deadline for ranking the Waterloo applicants is fast approaching, but we haven’t even received CVs from half the universities around here and haven’t met anyone else, so the timing isn’t very good between the different programs. It’s good between universities in the Montréal region, just not across provinces.

With what we’ve seen so far, we decided to hire 2 from Waterloo, which had sent us over 30 CVs, 10 of which we deemed interesting enough to interview, and 3 of which we’d like to work with.

But, again, why the discrepancy?

I spoke with a very nice internships supervisor from ÉTS, who told me that one “problem” was a red hot market for engineering coop students in Montréal. She said that for most coop terms recently, they have many more coop positions available than students to fill them, so the students have plenty of choice, and only apply to a handful. However, from what i gather, it’s the same situation at Waterloo, where most students told me they applied on 5 to 10 positions and saw many hundred postings. One guess is that there is simply more of a startup mentality at Waterloo, where students know of a few companies that originated from the university. How do we change that here?

If anyone has an input on this, and on how to make it easier for us to recruit quality students, please contact me (eric at akoha dot org). That being said, our current students are doing a great job, and we did get some very interesting applications for the next term.

So what are we looking for in an intern?

It’s simple, really: someone smart who gets things done. Someone with enthusiasm, someone who gets the project. Just as important as all that, someone we’ll get along with, who we know it’ll be fun working with.

Someone special.

We use technologies that are too new to be known by many, or aren’t new but for some reason still aren’t taught, so though we’d love to see someone who has excellent javascript-fu from writing an AJAX site for their school’s robotics club, or someone else who wrote a search algorithm in python that works efficiently on a 100e6 rows database table, it just doesn’t happen. So we look for people who are smart, motivated and interested and who we know will be able to pick up these skills easily.

Many students show interests outside of school, and that’s always a big plus. Some showed me some pretty good web work they’ve done. Some are just very cool people who actually dress for the part in the interview (you know who you are), and who at the end of the interview you figure you really want on your team.

I won’t say more, for fear of being attacked by a horde of applicants who will have prepared a scripted interview that would show exactly what we’re looking for, but that’s the gist of it.

So what are you waiting for?

If you’re a smart student whose interest was piqued by recent news from us, who’s already noticed our presence in different corners of the virtual universe, who thinks you’d get along great with our team, then please apply - we’ll always have interns and will always be on the lookout for them. Send us your resumé and cover letter to jobs at akoha dot org.­