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Robby Russell, CEO & Partner at Planet Argon
At Planet Argon, they have a unique take on internships. Not only are they not looking to hire their interns, they’re also devoting time to help them find work elsewhere. If the idea leaves you scratching your head, you’ll definitely want to tune in to this episode with Robby Russell, Planet Argon’s CEO and Partner.
Planet Argon’s reasoning is simple: improve the intern experience, offer mentoring opportunities to their internal team and hopefully make the industry a little better in the process. With this philosophy, they’ve documented their approach in a Tech Internship Toolkit which is available to anyone who wants to see it. So if you’re interested in setting up or improving your own internship program, or growing the next generation of tech leaders, here are some insights to help.
Carl: Hey, everybody, and welcome back. Sometimes you're thinking, "If I had an intern, I could get through a lot of this."
Carl: Then you think, "You know what, I want to do the right thing. I want to help, through internships, get people the skills they need so they can move on in their careers."
Carl: But then for most of us, we really avoid the whole internship thing because it just feels like it's going to be more work, and we're already so distracted, and we're not going to do a good job.
Carl: Well, today on the show, we have got the CEO of Planet Argon, a friend of mine from Planet Portland. Actually that works. I'm leaving that in. From Planet Portland.
Carl: He's been to a couple of owner camps. He only chooses the ones that start with an M, I believe, Minnesota and Montreal. Every owner summit ever, so thank you for that.
Carl: On today's show, we have got the author of "The Tech Internship Toolkit," Mr. Robby Russell. How's it going, Robby?
Robby: Doing great here on Planet Portland.
Carl: Planet Portland, I like it.
Robby: Thanks for having me on.
Carl: I'm glad you're here. It's funny because I'm starting to notice that my intros are taking up more and more of the show. I'm going to have to cut back on that.
Carl: Well, I want to start off just asking why? What was it that made you say, "We need this Tech Internship Toolkit."
Robby: That's a good question. I think the genesis of creating a toolkit was that we felt ... Well, basically, we had been doing it for a couple of years now, and we didn't really have anything documented.
Robby: So for part of it, it was just, how do we communicate with other people on the team to make sure that we all have a somewhat shared understanding of what is our philosophy to how, and our process for managing internships?
Robby: Two, I think more importantly, even though I didn't order that in one and two order, was that we've heard a lot of bad experiences from people that we didn't end up having as interns. But were interning elsewhere at other tech companies in the local area, that had really bad experiences as an intern.
Robby: We felt like, well, that's unfair to them. Maybe there's something we can give out and share with the local community and maybe the wider community on how we're doing it. It may not work for everybody, but at least, give some guidelines.
Robby: So you don't have that scenario where you have an intern show up on their first day, and they don't know where to go to, who to talk to, and it takes two days before they get a laptop, and there's been nothing set up for them, and they're twiddling their thumbs. That's really not fair to them.
Robby: So wanted to create something that we can say, "Hey, here's some ..." Wanted to speak to just all the reasons and the rationale that we've historically might've used to not have an internship, and try to dispel some of those things a little bit. But then also just outline our process and how we're handling it.
Robby: Hopefully, help us level up our internship programming ourselves, so that at least we can go back and refer to this and start iterating on it. That's how that-
Carl: Well, and it's super important when you realize the talent shortage that a lot of us are facing. It can be in any of a number of areas.
Carl: For a lot of people, they're digital PMs, they're just being gobbled up. It's one of those skills that you can feel like, "Ah, you know, somebody can come in and they can learn on the job and they can read a book and this and that." But it's not that way.
Carl: Then also if you're looking even at software developers or anyone in that realm, growing our own. When you look at apprenticeships, when you look at that trend that's happening, very few shops I think do a good job of that. Internships feel less heavy.
Carl: But at the same time with what you're saying, if somebody comes into an internship and their introduction to the industry is, "Nobody knows I'm here and I'm not sure why I am." Then it just falls apart.
Carl: So how do you go about getting ready? How do you prepare for an intern?
Robby: Well, there's a couple of things, maybe just provide also a little bit of background. We work closely with one of the local coding boot camps here in Portland called Epicodus.
Robby: So part of the end of their curriculum is they actually have to have an internship somewhere for, I think it's either six or eight weeks, at the end of their curriculum. So it's part of the finishing up of their process, so there's part of that.
Robby: So we've been opted into that for, I think, five years or so. We've been doing that through that as one channel of how we bring in interns. Speaking back to the previous question on why we created this, was also to help those interns that might want to come here, at least to understand what we're doing on our end to help prepare for them. Then make sure at the end of it that we're meeting those expectations so that we can get graded on our participation and how we manage that.
Robby: So within that coding bootcamp, there's this ... And something that we're proud of is that we're seen in Portland, in Planet Portland, as having one of the better internships. Because we've been doing this consistently and having a similar philosophy to it.
Robby: So that's been great. I think there's a couple of key ingredients we'll talk about later about what we do that's a little bit different. There's another aspect to one of our thoughts behind the toolkit. Was I wanted to make it explicitly clear to anyone that interns here, and to our own employees, that we don't see internships as a recruitment pipeline.
Robby: We're being very clear about that. So there's a couple of different reasons there. One, that we actually have a couple of employees here that were once interns that we hired. So it might seem a little counter intuitive that I'm saying that it's not a recruitment pipeline.
Robby: But one of the things that we set out to do is that we had a conversation about what it means to be a mentor with our employees. If we want to build mentorship skills in our employees, we need to have people that they can mentor. They could be other people that work here, but also interns are a good way to practice that skill. It becomes a time box period of time.
Robby: Then if we're up front with interns, that, "We're not going to hire you after the end of this, but we're going to give you LinkedIn recommendations and be happy to be a referral for you as you go off into the job search process." At least that gets rid of a few of those awkward conversations that you might have with interns.
Robby: Because even the people that have seen that, their last week or two, as we're asking, "Hey, how's it going with your job search and how's your resume coming along?" That's part of our process.
Robby: We had an intern leave last week, and they're like, "Well, if you need a front end developer, I'm looking for a job." I'm like, "We'll keep that in mind."
Robby: But I think because we bring them in through this easier channel, I don't feel like we're ... Historically, I've always been good at vetting those people, especially if they come through a pipeline like a coding bootcamp. Where they give us a pool of eight to 10 people that we'd interview and then they randomly draw based off of some algorithms and our preferences, who we end up with.
Robby: So for the one of those people to actually potentially become a full time employee at some point, we didn't really vet them in the same way that we would someone else that was applying through a job ad.
Robby: So we're always happy to let them apply for a job at some point, but we're never going to offer. I say that, never, [inaudible] just in case there's some really good person.
Robby: But we've also been in a scenario where we always get two bootcamp upcoming graduates at the same time. We've been in this, we've actually at least once had one of them, we're like, "We want to hire you but we don't want to hire the other one." Those are awkward conversations for everybody involved. But that's not a reason not to hire people. We're adults.
Robby: But with that, I just wanted to provide a little bit of context. We made a conscious decision that we didn't see it as a recruitment pipeline. This is a way for us to, A, practice our skills of becoming mentors, and helping improve the industry hopefully by sharing how we do things.
Robby: The idea is that always, when people ask like, "Well, why aren't you going to consider hiring me?" I'd be like, "I have to make space for the next interns." This is something we're committed to doing. We're going to constantly keep doing it. I want to have 12 to 15 interns a year come through our doors.
Robby: I can't do that if I hire a few of you. It's going to become more difficult because you're taking space away from someone else to come in and do that. Then we can reproduce that process over and over and over and get better at it.
Robby: So I think we think about it way. It's part of what we do. The toolkit, why we released it again was just to go back to your original question there, was to document how we've been trying to do things and where we hoped it to go in the coming years and hopefully see if that's something that could be useful to other folks.
Robby: We specifically frame this around tech internships, but I know of at least one company that isn't in our space that actually used the toolkit. They implemented their own tool, or internships this year. I think that helped pretty good too.
Carl: Well, I love this idea of taking the pressure off by saying, "You're here to learn, we're here to learn and develop our skills. Then at the end of the time period, we're going to do our best to help you out and say thanks."
Carl: Because you take the pressure off that there's anything after it. I think that's one of the biggest challenges. If somebody doesn't have a process like that or a continuity to the internship program, because there's not a program, they just got asked about an internship, they have no idea.
Carl: You know what, if you did like the person and you don't have somebody else coming in behind, you might be like, "Well, just hang out for a while. We'll find something for you." Right? Then the whole thing gets weird.
Carl: What I really like about the toolkit is that you do have these sections that are kind of like homework areas. Where it kind of gives you just a real simple checklist or a sheet to fill out.
Carl: One of the things that I remember is where it asks, what could your business do? What can you benefit from? Hold on just a second.
Carl: One of the things thing I like is it says what areas of your business could interns learn from? Then you're trying to figure out who in your company could help them with that. You actually are laying some groundwork for where they're going to get benefit and you're going to get benefit.
Carl: I think that's one of the biggest challenges in most internships, is you get approached by somebody you know, who has somebody who's trying to get into the business, and you just kind of force it in. Whereas you're actually putting together a little bit of a screener as to who's going to be best for you.
Robby: I think one of the things that we've tried to do, back to that whole providing mentorship skills in people, is that we do recruit junior developers that have maybe just recently graduated from a bootcamp or from a university or something. Within like six months, they have people that they're also getting to provide some intern mentorship too.
Robby: We don't just do it. I mean we've framed this particular toolkit around tech internships, but we just had a marketing intern that was recently here. We occasionally bring in a project manager intern. We try to deal with different facets of the business so that we make sure different people in the business are getting experience with that.
Robby: Then when we set someone up, they might not be managing anyone else at this point in the business, but now they have an intern that they're kind of responsible. Whether they're their buddy. Or our marketing, the person that heads up our marketing here was responsible for an intern. She's done two of them so far and she's getting progressively better.
Robby: So we're not quite ready to start hiring full time additional marketing personnel. But that person's now getting some experience on how to manage people for a couple months of time. Then so when we hopefully grow a bit more, they will have more skills at that point to know what it's going to take to bring in someone that they want to keep full time.
Carl: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You lay this groundwork, you find the people internally that can benefit as mentors. You find the people who are going to be the interns. The algorithm thing is kind of interesting that you get one selected for you like eHarmony or something.
Carl: Then paying an intern. That's something that I've always heard multiple sides around it. I've always believed that people should get paid. But you actually even talk about there are different ways to pay people.
Robby: That's true. So for example, I was mentioning the coding school. It's actually, we're not allowed to pay them because it's part of their curriculum. So they're essentially free to us. We give them some gifts at the end, usually things like Amazon gift cards. Or if we know that they're really into outdoor stuff, some REI and so they can invest in some of their backpacking equipment or something.
Robby: But so there's that part of it. But then the other way is we will do like a stipend for the people that we do put up an ad for and that don't come through a coding schools. So we all have, "All right, you're going to be here for a couple of months, this is how much we're going to pay you per week." Then we can do that.
Robby: I don't remember the exact legal paperwork we have to have them fill out, but I don't know if it's a W-9, or I forget how that's ... don't quote me on that. But I can talk to our HR person about that.
Robby: But there's at least those different ways. There's the other part of it is that, I'll talk about the type of work that we do a little bit. But those are the two main ways that we kind of compensate. Either you're getting credits in your school or you're being paid a stipend.
Carl: Gotcha. So for people who don't have a coding school, where should they look for their interns?
Robby: Hmm. I mean, I think it depends. So if you're in an environment where ... here in Planet Portland, we have a lot of-
Carl: It's going to be that from now on. Planet Portland, I love it.
Robby: I get Planet Argon a lot too. So that's not that crazy.
Robby: But I guess it's a few things. So if you didn't have a coding school type of funnel, I think the other ways that we've been able to bring in people, we just brought in a front end developer recently as an intern. We posted a job ad like we normally would on our site.
Robby: So we use Workable for managing our job ads. That gets posted out to a bunch of places. So it's on LinkedIn and a couple of other places, a bunch of other job boards. We explicitly say it's internship, and we outline what's involved and how long it's going to last.
Robby: We also will promote that on local tech community networks. So there's a lot of Slack groups and discussion forums where you can post job ads. Things like we have Portland Women in Tech. We have Chick Tech. There's some other diverse groups there that we can go in there. There's Local Ruby Slack groups, things like that. There's a PDX startups groups.
Robby: So there are local communities that typically have job boards that you can post that there. I don't know how the intern that we recently brought in for the front end position found us exactly. I can go talk to the person. I'm not going to answer that question right now.
Robby: But they did find us. I think we probably had, I feel like we probably had 20 to 40 applicants. That wasn't through a coding school for that position. You could also do that with local colleges and universities. They typically have job boards.
Robby: Or you can reach out to professors in some of those places and just ask them like, "Hey I know you teach a programming class. Who should I talk to there about? We're doing internships this summer or this fall or something. Where would be a good place to post something?" Because they typically have something for students there.
Robby: We had our marketing intern just graduated from the university and immediately like a week or two later, she started with us for the summer. So somehow she found us through that process I think.
Carl: Gotcha. So basically put out ads, hit the normal channels you would even for a job. And also universities and colleges and community colleges.
Robby: Exactly.
Carl: I mean that's part of it, to find people who may not be getting the chance otherwise. I think that's always a big part of it.
Carl: One of the things I remember from my internship was that I showed up and nobody knew I was coming. It was so embarrassing. You walk in and the person at the front desk is like, "I don't know. Who did you talk with?"
Carl: Then you say that you talked with the person who happens to be the CEO. Then they're not there that day and you just had a conversation with them and they said, "Come on in."
Carl: But I think that was one of the things I was most impressed with and what I would have loved. Now I stayed at that organization for 14 years because they did hire the intern. But the thing that I was so impressed with was this idea of the detailed process for onboarding. Maybe it's not even that detailed, it's just really thoughtful.
Carl: So talk about how you onboard one of your interns.
Robby: Sure. So just kind of why ... I suppose it should be very similar to how you would onboard an employee. It's a temporary employee in a lot of ways.
Robby: So part of what we do with any employee, and intern is we all, we have our checklist of all the things that we need to do ahead of time. So we have a checklist of all the things from making sure that all their accounts and do we have a laptop ready for them. We printed out some details on how they can log into their email account.
Robby: We have little things that we stick on their desks so that they can make some of those first few steps. Then the other thing is we'll always have a buddy. We'll send them an email a week before being like, "Hey, come in at nine o'clock sharp on Monday. We have a 9:15 team company meeting."
Robby: "You have a buddy. John is going to be your buddy, he'll be there waiting for you. He's going to show you where your desk is. He'll be around for the first several days to kind of answer questions on where you should go, who you should talk to you about different things. We have a bunch of meetings already scheduled for you."
Robby: So we don't really treat it that ... I mean it's a little lighter version than what we would do with a normal full time employee. It literally is our same onboarding checklist for an employee, for an intern. We just go in and be like, "Okay, we don't need to give them access to all of these things." So we just kind of distilled those things down.
Robby: So it's a very similar thing. So we'll do things like also making sure that providing information, even you should do this with your employees, or people you're about to hire. It's have an outline of what projects do you think they're going to work on? What's the dress code at your organization?
Robby: Or at least let them know that you don't need to show up in a suit and tie if they've not been there. Because it's not ... they'll pick up on it after a day or two, but let them know ahead of time I think is always a good. Make sure that they know when to show up. We'll also make sure that there's a lunch scheduled that first day.
Robby: So their buddy will take them and bring another employee or two with them to go lunch. Then they'll get to talk a little bit more and get to know them and make sure that I have meetings scheduled with them while they're here so that I can talk with them early on.
Robby: I'm always running. I think it's always a really good opportunity for me to, a week or so in, I'll meet them early on, but maybe a week or so in, have a half hour conversation. Then I have a handful of questions I like to ask. Like, "How would you describe Planet Argon to one of your peers?"
Robby: Just kind of leave some open ended questions and just let them talk about how they're feeling about things. I'll ask them similar questions towards the end of their internship as well. But it's always just to kind of get a good pulse on what their perception is. I mean usually it's a lot more of a glowing response early on. It's probably good for my ego I suppose. But I think that I, but you can definitely get ...
Robby: It's an opportunity for you to learn about your business too. I think during this scenario. Because they're going to be there for a short period of time and they also know that they're not going to be there forever. So maybe they'll share some stuff or let you know if there's some issues.
Robby: Then again the other part is making sure they have something to contribute to in those first few days as well. I think that's something you should do with employees, any employee, but, and I can talk a little bit more about the types of work that we do for interns. The kind of work that we do. Because we have some strong opinions about some of that as well.
Carl: One of the things that's really interesting to me is, first of all, it makes perfect sense what you're saying. Treat them like an employee. That was always, I think the problem that we had. We didn't do that, when I was running engine. We never treated an intern as an employee. They were somebody who was coming in and we'd find something for them to do.
Carl: If we had been paying them a salary or even thought of it that way, even a small amount, we probably would have been a lot more on purpose. So that makes sense.
Carl: But what I like is this, there's got to be a side effect for your culture where people remember what it's like when they first came in and kind of go, "Wow. Planet Argon's pretty cool. We actually do good stuff." And this person's eyes are lighting up because they're realizing this is a pretty cool place. So it feels like there's a great cultural benefit too.
Robby: In theory. I can't say it's always great. Because overall, I think that's true. I say that. But there are those times where you feel like, I think people worry that maybe they can get left alone a little bit too much.
Robby: Or when like someone's really busy on a project and they're not being able to provide mentorship as much during that short period of time, there can be a little bit of worry. But then we try as a team to make sure we can help smooth that over and provide some guidance.
Robby: Knowing that a big part of this industry, sometimes you do need to learn how to be autonomous and productive by yourself at times. As long as you have some good direction on what you can be working on and stuff.
Robby: But we want to make sure that when the employee shows up, or intern, on their first day, at the end of the day, do they feel like they're welcome? Do they feel like they know a few people by their first name hopefully? Where they able to get access to different things? All the tools that we have, there's a lot to learn about what it's like to work at an agency or any company. Want to overwhelm them too quickly, but also give them some exposure. So that way when they start ...
Robby: I really think this is a good way for, again, back to us learning to be better mentors. But also how do we help set them up for as best success as possible? So then when they go into an interview, after our internship or even during it. We've had some people interviewing during the middle of it and get jobs before they finish with us. And that's always awesome as well.
Robby: So but to know that ... one of the things we're always trying to find out about them is, especially towards the end of the internship, as they reflect on the work that they've done with us, how are they going to talk about that with someone else? So we ask them to get up and talk about the work they've done. In some of our team lunches. So they'll do demos.
Robby: I'll always ask, "So how are you going to describe this project to someone that you're in an interview with?" Use that as an opportunity to let them just talk. Then we can kind of give them some ideas on maybe some different ways to frame that. To show that you actually understand more than just the technical tasks at hand.
Robby: But how you had to need and work and gather, you worked with a client on this. You gathered requirements and you had rounds of revisions. What the QA process was. To show that you understand more than just sitting in front of a code editor and could write some code and know how to interact with kit, and someone approved it or something.
Carl: Well, so I want to talk about the types of projects that they work on. Because my internship, I didn't realize this until probably about a week and a half of hard work, that the project that I was working on had already been finalized and sent out before I ever started my internship.
Carl: They basically just gave me busy work. I remember how mad I got because I was like, "I'm trying to create something that I can take somewhere else and show someone so that I can get that job." But on the flip side, there's concern about an intern working on a client project. So how do you determine what they're going to work on?
Robby: It's a good question. So we learned early on that kind of, I don't think we've ever just tried to provide people with busy work. We always give them something that we could use some help with. Whether that be an internal pet project or some client work.
Robby: There's a couple of different thoughts there. There's a couple of things we want to be able to do in their experience. We want to give them projects that they can wrap up while they're there.
Robby: We also want to be very intentional about having them work on projects that they're not going to finish. Or it's really unlikely that they'll finish in the time that they have available in their internship.
Robby: Because I think it was an important part to a skill set to pick up is how do you leave a unit of work for the next person to work on?
Robby: So sometimes they're picking up projects someone else is working on, whether it's an employee or a former intern. There is a really important part about making sure that you've kind of organized and documented where you are with things and what the next steps are. What's it going to take to finish this? And pass it off to someone because you might be going on ....
Robby: As an employee, that happens when you get sick, or something happens, or you change jobs, or you're going on vacation for several weeks and someone else needs to pick up on that. I think that's an important skill to learn. I don't think they're going to be perfect at the internship level, but I want to be very intentional about ... I'm not expecting them ...
Robby: I'm not going to tell them that necessarily. Towards the very end, I'm like, "I didn't actually expect you to finish it. This is why it's important that." So they might feel a little bit stressed at points and I think those are all good healthy things to do.
Robby: But once we can say, "Hey, okay, this is not going to happen in the timeline. We have a week, how can we get this in good shape for one of our other employees to pick it up and run with it when you're gone?"
Robby: And they're like, "Oh, okay." And explaining why. So I have some kind of opinions about that.
Robby: But going back to a little bit more on your question about the type of work that we do. So for some of our interns, they're free to us because they come from the coding school and it's part of the credits.
Robby: Because we have, most of the type of work that we do is ongoing development and maintenance for projects that have been around for a while. So a lot of our clients have actually been our clients for five plus years. So we've been able to build up some good rapport with them. We'll have a couple of clients.
Robby: We have a really big local client. I'm not going to name them but they make some shoes.
Carl: Rhymes with Mikey.
Robby: Maybe. We'll chat with them and be like, "Hey, so we have some interns coming in. Are there a few things that have been on the backlog that are kind of low priority? Or some nice to haves that you'd like to get for free?" That's a easy question for them to be like, "Actually, that sounds great."
Robby: I'm like, "I can't promise they'll finish it. But if they do, you'll get a couple of little features or a little improvements to the application." There's two parts to this.
Robby: One, the client's getting a little bit of free work. But I said also the caveat there is you're going to need to work a little bit with our interns. So we happen to have a few clients where the people that we work with directly on our clients side, are open to this.
Robby: They're willing to do a little bit, they're willing to answer a few questions here and there for them, and work with engineer with them. Knowing that that's taking up a little time for exchanging, getting some free work for them. So that's one part.
Robby: For our interns we pay, we actually will charge our clients a far reduced rate for their work. At times, depending on the type of work that we're doing. So we are trying to get them to work on, we want our interns who actually haven't an experience of working directly. Not just with us but with clients because that's what we do. We're a client services business.
Robby: So if you're here, if you don't get to interact with the clients, and unless you're an agency where you shield your developers from clients. We don't, so interns you need to have some of that exposure.
Robby: Then at the end of that, so the interns leave here and maybe they got to release a couple of updates for one of these big clients. That's something they can reference in one of those internship interviews or one of their interviews that they might have.
Robby: I kind of think that some of that name dropping might not ... I think that helps us also with the recruitment of other interns. They want to come here and intern because they know that they get to work on interesting real world projects. That becomes an attraction.
Robby: Because there's always that fear like, "Oh, I'm going to work on some pet project that some CEO came up with." Like, "Hey, build this internal tool, it may or may not get done or something like that."
Robby: We know of another company in town that was doing internships and at first I thought it was a really good idea. Is that they would challenge their interns. They would bring in like two or four interns at the same time and they would pair them up into different groups and say, "Okay." They would have the intern groups work on the same exact in parallel and isolate it.
Robby: So both groups would have to build the same thing and then every few weeks they would talk about where they're at and share and stuff. I thought that was an interesting idea, but then they would just repeat the cycle each time they brought in new interns and I was like, "That's interesting."
Robby: It was something that just got thrown away at the end of the day. Or maybe they can at least put it on their GitHub repository. But it's just another portfolio thing. And I'm like, "There's no real world usage."
Robby: Our interns are going through an experience of working on some changes to an application that's heavily used. Something that they can go see in production out in the wild. And know that they like they can go tell their peers or potential future employers, "See that little widget thing? I made that and I was only there for eight weeks or something."
Robby: So we do that. Then sometimes we'll, I know as just a confession, sometimes we also do have people work on some of our own stuff. We have some traditional things we do each year. We have a year end review project we do every year. We'll have a different webpage that gets designed. We might have interns work on that, implementing that.
Robby: But that does make it out into the wild, into a production. It will get deployed at some point. Or they're making changes to our own website or something like that.
Robby: We had a marketing intern over the summer and we were able to pass off a bunch of activities related to promoting my podcast to that intern over there. So they got experience of actually being part of overseeing the editing process with our editor, being able to promote the stuff. Talking with the guests that I've been speaking with. Helping promote the content, posting on all the different social media things.
Robby: So they were actually able to just get to be part of that process. So they kind of ran the project for a couple of months. That was again, it's another project that actually has a real world output and they were compensated for their time as well.
Carl: Which I think is what you want as an intern. In my internship, I eventually got to work on projects for AT&T and Blue Cross Blue Shield. These were things, when I went back to school for my senior year, I was able to share with my professors and actually get, I guess you would say, elevated into some opportunities I wouldn't have before I ever went out into the workforce.
Carl: So to give them something real that they can move forward with, I think that's the dream for an intern. Is not to be fetching coffee and cleaning up the kitchen, but to be working on something that's actually going to be out there and you can show someone.
Carl: So how do you wrap it up? Once the intern's getting ready to head out. I love the idea of learning to transition your work or else you'll never going to get to take a vacation. So that was a good one. I want to throw that in there.
Carl: But when they are say in that final week and they're almost out the door, what does that look like?
Robby: Well, assuming we've already done some show and tells, depending on the schedule, we'll make sure we get some time for them to do that. But there's usually a couple of meetings that they'll have.
Robby: I usually meet with them on one of their last few days. I have kind of like a very, it's similar to an exit interview. I'll just want to get a sense of where things are at, how things went? What sort of advice could they provide to us on how to improve the internship for the next people?
Robby: I think those are important things to try to capture so that we can learn from that. Sometimes it could be maybe the buddy that we assigned to them, we didn't think ahead that that person was actually going to be really busy.
Robby: Or they were going to be on vacation for two or three weeks of a two month internship. Like, "Oh, right. Shit. We totally could have predicted that that was going to be an issue."
Robby: So just thinking about some of those things. I think trying to catch some of that. But also having them talk about their final project towards the end of the process. Just to share. We'll have other people review how they prepared the work that maybe wasn't finished. We will take them out for lunch and all those other things you would do for any, hopefully, any last day for an employee.
Robby: But a big part of it, leading up those last, as I touched on earlier, was it's really important. Sometimes you'll find interns that are really nervous about that next stage. Especially if they've just come through university or through coding.
Robby: They don't know if they're going to get a job yet. They don't know if they're hireable. They don't know if this is ... they had access to this and they're clinging onto it. I've seen it over and over. We might have 10 to 15 different interns each year. I would say a third of them, half of them, put off getting ready to go out and start applying for jobs until afterwards.
Robby: So we've started making some changes to our process for a week or two ahead, start making sure that we're checking in like, "Hey, how's that process going? Have you started applying anywhere yet?" I'm like, "Let me look at your resume. Let me look at how you're drafting your cover letters. I'm happy to give you some advice on that."
Robby: So it's like, in a weird way, we become kind of almost I guess almost like a recruiter for them, but we're not trying to actually go out and help them get a job. But I mean we're not reaching out to companies like, "You need to talk to this person." That's their responsibility.
Robby: But just reminding them, "You need to get ready and we fully think you're capable of doing this." Assuming we believe that. I don't think that's not ever been the case.
Carl: If you ever have to say, "You know, Jimmy John's is a way to stay healthy and you can deliver some great food, people are going to love you. Yeah. It's just something to look at."
Carl: But no, I love this idea of ... because it's a reflection on you and your team and the value you were able to provide for them to go out there and then find that first job. So I think that's amazing.
Carl: Do you stay in touch with them after the internship? What does that look like?
Robby: Yeah, definitely. When they're wrapping up, one of the first things we do is we'll send out everybody a reminder in Slack. Like, "Hey, everybody, here's so-and-so's LinkedIn. Go. If they haven't already asked you to connect there, request to connect with them." It doesn't take, it's a couple of clicks in LinkedIn to do that.
Robby: "If you've worked closely with them, write a nice little recommendation for them on there. Just share about your experience. Talk to them up a little bit, help give them some confidence." So we'll do that.
Robby: A couple of months into it, we'll check in to see how things are going. We celebrate people when we find out that interns got a job somewhere. That's always one of the best ... getting a Slack link for a LinkedIn post is usually not all that exciting. Except for when it's an employee that's, or a former intern, that got a job somewhere and it's like "Yay."
Robby: Then there's usually some excitement there and sometimes I'll take a screenshot of the responses and then I'll email that to them. Be like, "Hey, so happy for you. Congratulations. Definitely keep in touch." So we'll check in with them two or three months in, six months.
Robby: When we remember to do it, we'll check in with them a year or two, one or two years later. Because they don't always keep in touch. As much as you wish they would, it's always what ever happened to that person?
Robby: It was actually a couple of days ago, I had a former employee said that one of our former interns was applying here. Or applying at their company now and asked if what did I remember about that person from two years ago? I was like, "Great question."
Robby: I went and looked at LinkedIn and I'm like, "Well, here's what I wrote about them two years ago when they were here." So I don't remember very closely at the moment any more because we've had 20, 30 people since then. But that can get a little lost.
Robby: So capture that stuff while it's fresh. It's two months of reviewing someone. So you can definitely probably say a few positive things are in there as well. Talk about some of their strengths.
Robby: So keep in touch and then we'll occasionally do blog posts to talk about where our interns are now. So like two years later, we'll have a collection. It's a good blog post content thing to work on. Because it's always like, "Here's a list of 10 people and here's the jobs they're at."
Robby: Then they'll hopefully retweet it and then you get some social media credibility for that too. That helps you promote and try to bring in more interns.
Carl: Yeah, for sure. I mean if I were an intern and I saw that you were promoting something that somebody went through the program three years ago or even a year ago, I'd be like, "Wow, this place cares. I want to be there."
Carl: Robby, I have to say thank you for "The Tech Internship Toolkit." We'll have this in the show notes and I know we've put it in some of the roundups before.
Carl: But it's just for you to take this and share it with everyone, it's just a betterment thing for the whole industry. So thank you so much and thank you for everything you're doing for these people coming into the community.
Robby: You're welcome, I suppose. But also, I feel very fortunate that I get to be in a position where I could provide opportunities. That's one of my missions in life is to help open up opportunities. This has been a way to exponentially do that.
Robby: We're next door to, Instrument is a pretty big company here in Planet Portland.
Carl: Just kind of big.
Robby: They're basically taking all the buildings and they're now our downstairs neighbor. But we have a couple of former interns that work there and we see them in the courtyard.
Robby: It's always like, "Hey, Robby, how are things?" And I'm like, "That person was awesome a couple of years ago." I'm so excited for them. So we're doing great things and that always feels good.
Carl: Well, that's great, man, and I look forward to seeing you soon. And everybody listening, thank you so much. We'll be back again next week. All the best.
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