Recruiting undergraduate interns - best practices

June 29, 2020

by a searcher from Harvard University - Harvard Business School in San Diego, CA, USA

It has been a few years since I was last searching, with lots of changes in the interim. I am interested to hear from current searchers to know what works for recruiting and managing productive interns and how that might have changed over time. I'd love to ramp up on collective knowledge rather than learning the hard/old fashioned way.

About five years ago we had very good luck working with undergraduate interns to help build lists and manage the proprietary pipeline. The best interns (in our experience) have been accounting, finance, business, or engineering students from second tier regional colleges, community colleges and the state university system. We had better luck with international students, than American, and we have found that working remotely was very effective. These undergrads, in our experience, were the most intrinsically motivated, easy to manage, very sharp and industrious. The general contract was that we would provide mentorship, teaching and some opportunity for involvement in cursory due diligence, in exchange for lots of research, contact mining and email management.

This worked well as long as we were able to manage the time commitment for mentoring/teaching. We set very clear goals which included ~150 new verified targets per week. The process of managing interns was pretty straightforward: interns that delivered the contact volume required got an hour a week of mentoring/coaching and possibly a recommendation letter, the others fell off the back of the wagon without consuming valuable searcher time.

For recruiting we used the college job boards and craigslist (surprisingly worked well).

We quit using MBA interns early on because of the time commitment to manage, and the lower productivity that we experienced generating our most valuable resource - good quality, verified contacts. There were a couple of exceptions to this. MBA interns were better when it came to niche discovery, and could actually help with die diligence. Generally we found that the juice was not worth the squeeze.

I would love to hear from others on here, what has worked for you? Where you are recruiting? Which job boards are working well.? What has changed with COVID? What are best management practices? Any other tricks that you think will help to enhance the collective wisdom.

Reply by an investor
from University of Texas at Austin in Austin, TX, USA

We get###-###-#### internship/fellowship applications from undergrads each year using job boards mentioned above plus https://careerup.com/ has been helpful in getting very committed candidates. To handle this volume, we’ve got a simple, efficient process: Application Stage: Using Typeform or Google Forms, candidates apply, knowing exactly what’s expected—tasks, hours, value exchange. We ask them to self-assess their finance knowledge, but we care more about their commitment than their finance experience. Video Interview Stage: Those who pass the first cut do an asynchronous video interview on VideoAsk, answering: Introduce yourself and your background. What are your career goals? Doesn’t have to be finance based to be considered so tell us what you really want, not what you think we want to hear. Why are you the best fit for this opportunity? This lets us screen many candidates quickly, ditching the inefficiency of traditional 1-1 interviews. Final Interview Stage: Shortlisted candidates get a 20-minute 1-1 interview, more like a coffee chat, to confirm alignment and get them excited about working together. Our approach fixes the broken traditional interview system. We hire for attitude and potential, not just experience. Half of our hires have no finance background and over half are women. We value enthusiasm and energy, coaching and challenging our fellows because, let’s face it, everyone’s figuring it out as they go. Here’s our program in case it’s helpful: The Activus Fellowship is a semester-long program for a select group of outstanding business students seeking hands-on experience in private equity investing. The program is focused around the art and science of evaluating investment opportunities in the lower middle market and consists of three main components: Education & Training, Pitching Investment Opportunities, Community & Coaching https://activuscapital.com/fellowship/

Reply by a searcher
from University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, USA

In terms of recruiting a site called handshake now is in with most colleges around the country so it is relatively easy to post on individual college job boards. My partner and I posted internship roles recently and were bombarded with applicants. To screen we sent out the following email to the resumes we liked

Given the abbreviated time frame and work from home requirements, we have had to streamline our recruitment process. We ask that interested applicants answer the following pre-screening questions. Based on your answer to these questions we will extend you an invitation for a final round virtual interview.

If you are interested in proceeding with our interview process please answer the following questions via email. In the interest of time, interview slots will be given on a first come first serve basis. We recommend responding no later than 48 hours after your receipt of this email.

1. What are the EBITDA multiple ranges of for-profit educational programs (this is our target industry)?

2. Find (3) relevant comparable transactions in the for-profit education arena and provide 2 sentence summaries on each.

3. What is a search fund and why does this interest you? (1 Paragraph Max.)

We got some great responses so far and will hopefully be making a few hires from there. Will let you know if they end up working out.

+7 more replies.

Join the discussion