This episode ended up being much more about how to increase workforce diversity than how to hire interns. Here’s a quick rundown:
- Tyler and his team at Less Annoying CRM want to increase diversity
- They primarily source candidates via their summer internship program
- Tyler and his team have had great success at WashU with this model
- However, this has led to a lack of diversity across his 17 employees (~50% went to WashU)
- Tyler wants more internships to come from schools other than WashU
- Despite effort, Tyler has not been able to replicate the internship funnel at other schools in Missouri
- E.g. He’s tried recruiting via career fairs, by connecting with professors, and by partnering with student groups
- Tyler pointed out that WashU is successful is due to the numerous former WashU graduate success stories that currently work or formerly worked at Less Annoying CRM
- I.e. They have product-market fit at WashU for their internship offering
- However, at other schools, they can’t even get students to apply
- I.e. They don’t know if they have the right internship offering yet
- Rick recommended Tyler focus on customer development to learn more about what the students at these other colleges are looking for
- Tyler realized that creating diversity is really hard, and focusing on small wins initially is key
Takeaways include:
- Internships provide a safe way to hire because they allow you to work with someone temporarily before you extend a full-time offer
- Summer internships, by their nature, discriminate in favor of privilege
- Private schools have a culture that encourages summer internships; Public schools don’t seem to have this same focus.
- One challenge is that college students, privileged or not, are not very responsive
- When working to increase diversity, focusing on small wins up front is key. Once you get your foot in the door with a new segment, it gets much easier from there.
The problem
Tyler: All right, let's dive into the topic for today. So this one is mine. So basically we're going to talk about how to recruit interns. And I can give a little background on where I'm coming from with this topic. Basically at Less Annoying CRM, so we have 17 employees, but we've hired significantly more than that in total because every summer we have about 10-ish interns, or coding fellows, which coding fellows and interns are about the same thing here.
Tyler: Basically college students who come for the summer. We've had a lot of success with this. It makes hiring really easy because you get to take risks on people kind of and bring in a bunch of people. And then if someone's really a perfect fit, give them a full-time offer to work here after they graduate. So have had a lot of success with that. Really enjoy it. And I kind of have a system worked out, which maybe one thing we should talk about today is just what's currently working. Like Rick, you went to Duke, I went to WashU. That type of place has an intern culture. Students are planning on applying for these, it's expected. Other universities in the area don't have that culture. And we've struggled to get students interested in it, which is kind of counter intuitive because they're schools where the fact that they're paid internships and it's a really great opportunity. You'd think it'd be even more appealing to someone who's not going to as top tier of a school. But the reality is we really struggle to get anyone from those other schools even to apply. So the results-
Rick: Sorry, what are they doing instead?
Tyler: Yeah, it's a combination of things. Part of it is a lot of these schools, people aren't full-time students as much and so they're not off for the summer in the same way. So that's one challenge. And then the other thing is, I think if you're going to a $60,000 a year private university, probably you come from wealth and probably you kind of have options. And you're like, "I'm going to dabble and try different things and see where my life takes me." If you're going to, for example, the local public university, UMSL, University of Missouri-St. Louis, still a good school. But if you go there probably you're like, "I need a job out of this." And you're majoring in whatever you're majoring in and you're not looking for random other opportunities that aren't specifically in your field.
Rick: Sorry, I interrupted you when you were describing the problem. I'll let you finish that.
A lack of diversity, starting with interns
Tyler: Yeah. Okay. Sorry, I'm rambling here. I'm basically done. But basically we have a model that works for hiring interns at WashU. We don't have a model that works elsewhere and the result of this is our employee base lacks diversity in any number of ways. First of all, there's kind of socioeconomic diversity of only rich kids go to WashU. And then also WashU has its own diversity problems in terms of race, in terms of gender, at least on the technical side. So we're not getting a very diverse applicant pool because of the way we're recruiting interns. So I'm interested in discussing how can we go out and attract interns from other universities that maybe don't have that strong of an intern culture.
Rick: Got it. So diversify your interns?
Tyler: Yes. Exactly.
Rick: The problem is you lack diversity with your interns, you've been trying to increase that, you haven't been able to for a number of different reasons, which we'll probably go into later. I'm very interested in what you're... I think you're right. I think it should start with how you do interns. What the intern period is, what you're paying, what you're offering and what's going well so far with those.
How Less Annoying CRM does internships
Tyler: Cool. Okay. So the history here, so a lot of people probably haven't heard of WashU, but in terms of price and difficulty to get into, it's kind of like a top 15 top 20 university. Lots of rich kids, people with high test scores, right?
Rick: It's the best school that no one knows about.
Tyler: Yeah, it's probably there. It's on par with the Northwestern. Except you've heard of Northwestern and you haven't heard it WashU.
Rick: Exactly. I remember when one of my buddies in high school got into WashU and he was so excited. He was running around. This is a Charlotte private high school. He's running running around the halls going, "I got into WashU, I got in WashU." Everybody's like, "What is WashU? The University of Washington? You're going to go the West Coast?"
Tyler: Or George Washington.
Rick: "What are you talking about?"
Tyler: Yeah, so no one's heard of it, but it's a pretty good school, which comes with all the downsides of good schools. So I did what every first time entrepreneur does, which is the first time I had to hire people, I was like, "I don't know. I'm going to go back to the school I went to. And I already know people there and I'm going to start recruiting." And it was pretty easy. Basically we posted on there, every university has a free job board and any employer can sign up and post there. We went to the career fair. People walk by, we g...