Let me give you a few historical details first.
We are on the market since 2017. And when we just started, to hire a good team was a big challenge, we had a few students, a few more experienced guys, and me, as tech lead/developer/PM/person who can solve any issue.
Time passed, we become bigger and the covid time came, we thought that it will be a great time to hire good talents, but in reality only first few weeks, maybe a month, the companies fired the worst candidates, and after that chaos came: everyone starts working remotely, live online, a lot of startups have been started, a great time for it sector. We start hiring not only from Ukraine (it became almost impossible to find a good one, as each developer gets 100-200 requests on LinkedIn per week) where we start but also from Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, and Mexico.
During this time we, of course, grew our specialists, and tried to make each employee's life cycle in the company as long as possible (our goal was a 2-year average), hiring was very expensive.
We started from the course, it was the first obvious idea. It has been failed:
1) need a lot of time for explanation and mentoring
2) it was free, so we lose money on my time (of course I was that superhero teacher who want to explain again and again basic things)
3) as it was free, people didn't find it valuable, if you don't pay for something you don't appreciate it
So time passed, and I found that people with 1-1,5 years of experience come from other companies, ask for big salary (if compare with the knowledge), and don't know even basic code styles things
Here idea of internship come, base on by 4 years experience as CTO I understood that can upgrade people knowledge to 1-2 year experience (that were in the market) during 3 month, if they have finish courses
We had same challenges:
1) motivation
2) time
3) people for mentoring
Solve the first item was easy - we promise the work for the best 2 people
The second one was the most difficult: how to spend a small amount of time and get a good effort. This was the core of my idea, let me share what was finally the process and what result we get
Phase 1
First of all, to make any project work, developers are not enough, the additional minimum is PM and QA. Our priority was developers so about PM and QA validation and work process I will describe in another article if it is interesting.
To get best best candidates, we divide interview into few steps:
1) questionnaire with motivation letter
2) test task
3) soft skills interview and english language check
Phase 2
We created 2 team with 5 devs, PM and QA in each team
I have prepared tech instruction and rules documents. PM prepare tasks and board. Internship start. General flow look like that. Each day developers making a code, each day they send code for review, and here is the part which take longest time for me 30m-1h per day first month I have spend for code check (20h per month), from second month process changed, they check each other first and then send for me to review, so my time decrease to 5-7h per month.
They also had, daily calls, planing, retrospective, and demo. Demo was 1h call for both team, in this call they present me they work (2h per month)
Phase 3
We gather 360 feedback each month, internship took 3 month. At the end we had developer who know all code styles rules, know how lead project from beginning until the end, improve english conversation, worked with git, jira, understand QA process and responsibility of each team member.
During 3 months different situations could happen and it match easier to understand does a person's soft skills match with your company's or no
From 14 people usually finished around 10, and we took 1-2, based on our needs.
Items for improve:
1) decrease my time to 10h per month
2) add english validation test instead of interview, to decrease hr time
3) create some social project, to increase motivation and impact
4) on developers stage we now satisfy with final quality, need improvements in QA and PM side
Summary
Internships show very good results with quite a small amount of time and cost if compare with people that we hired from the market at that time with 1-2 years of experience.
Hope you found something useful for you, left your comment. It's important for me to get your feedback. If you want some more details, let me know, I'm open to sharing my experience
Greetings! Very helpful advice in this particular post! It is the little changes that will make the most important changes. Thanks a lot for sharing!
Everything is very open with a clear description of the issues. It was truly informative. Your site is very helpful. Many thanks for sharing!