Summer of Tech internship, are you ready?
This year I have the pleasure of being part of the Summer of Tech hiring process. During the process, I was amazed by the young talents and their proactive attitude to take the challenge to start their career in the tech area.
A lot of people would love to help with the internship program. In this post, I would like to share some learning and insights from my Summer of Tech experience. Hope those insights can help with both the students and the organization staff who's keen to help with the hiring.
For Students:
After register in the Summer of Tech, as a student, you can find the process and main events, due date on their official website. As a recruiter, we don't have enough time to answer all the questions. And this year, due to Covid19, we hosted all our events online. I would recommend reading all the instructions from the Summer of Tech website before joining some of these events, so the conversation between students and recruiter can focus on the roles, required skillsets, teams, and working environment.
One of the events we hosted this year was an online Q&A session. We had nearly 400 people online, to answer the questions of who we are, what we're doing, what role we have, what we are looking. One of the questions comes up repeatedly is are we emphasize hard skills such as programming, or are we truly looking for students who have great potentials, but might not very strong in those hard skills. And I would like to say it's the latter.
Banking is evolving, and we want to hire people who can grow with the organization and adapt the changes in the Bank. Modern Agile, DevOps, Business Agility, Clouds, Open APIs, all the new technologies and methodologies that Bank need to apply requires consistent change. Changing is the new norm now. And we need people who can adapt to the changes, who has the growth mindset, who are passionate about learning, and able to proactively planning their career and future.
Of course, hard skills are crucial. We can't hire someone to be a developer but cannot write code. But I would argue we should filter by mindset and soft skills first, then looking at the hard skills. And this year, a simple strategy helped me to finally decide (it's still a tough call) who's going to be in the finalist is: "Who has the technical background to understand the system we're building, good with communication, and most likely to be successful in an ambiguous environment". Set up people to be a success in their roles, regardless it's a permanent role or an internship, in my opinion, is one of the keys to driving success in the organization. And we want students to be successful in our organization, as much as they do for themselves.
For Staff:
The recruiting process for the Summer of Tech internship is not a simple task, especially with Covid19, all the events hosted online this year, make it harder and challenging for both our staff and students. We don't have a dedicated team working for the Summer of Tech hiring process. Most of our engineers who's been part of the Summer of Tech volunteer their time to be part of the recruiting process. Apart from that, they still need to do their daily job.
I'm optimizing for learning, and an opportunity to be part of Summer of Tech is something I would say yes. But apart from what I need to do for the Summer of Tech, I still have a job to do. For people who also want to volunteer their time for the Summer of Tech, a few tips I would like to share:
- Set the expectations with your team, so they know what to expect.
Your team members also have a job to do as well, and when you've been away for Summer of Tech, you could be potentially a bottleneck for your team. Communicate with them to understand what they need from you, could you do documentation or a quick handover to someone so when you're not available for your team, someone else can still pick up your job. Also, get an understanding of what's coming next for the team, and plan for it. Summer of Tech is an ongoing process, and if you want to be part of it, communication is the key.
- Having a strategy.
A strategy can help you identify your goals and constraints that bring actions. To make this experience smooth for you as a recruiter, build a small strategy to guide you through the process would be helpful. You might need to attend an online Q&A session, or a Meet and Greet event, or a Speed Interview, regardless of what you need to do, write down some short speaking notes for yourself. It will make it easier if you're new to those events.
Also, come up with a hiring strategy, write down what are the most important aspects you're looking for the roles. Some jobs might require more analytic thinking and others might need people to be good at communication. Write them down before you interview the students. For our hiring, we wrote down four aspects we care the most: culture fit, communication, willingness to learn, core skills (technology related, consider both transferable and non-transferable skills) with few lines of explanation and examples. And these helped us to see who could be potentially a good fit for the role.
- Be kind when providing feedback.
Feedback is useful for students to learn what they need to improve. But providing constructive, actionable feedback is not easy. I would prefer only to provide feedback when students ask for it. I would send out a standard reply to inform the students with the results of the interview, then follow up with individual when they ask for feedback. And also try to provide something they can act on rather than only share my personal opinion.
If you're interested in being part of the Summer of Tech, read their blogs and reports to find out more:
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