Whether to hire co-ops and how many to hire is always a lively debate at ThoughtWire. Do we even have time to go through the hiring process? What about finding work for them once they're here; will we have enough, and how much extra work will it place on our staff? Will we get value out of having the students? How's the student pool this year; will we be able to find / attract quality students? Will the students get value out of being at ThoughtWire? These are all pretty good questions and the answers will depend on a lot of factors. I also think they're all pretty irrelevant except for the last one to which the answer is a resounding yes, students get value from working and not even mainly money.
Of course you don't have time to go through the hiring process; everyone is way too busy. Yes it will be hard to provide the guidance and structure needed and define work they can do. Yes it's hard to attract good students. Whether you get value out of them will depend on the students, the type of work you define and how much effort you put into the process. All of that is beside the point though, hiring them and helping them find a useful place matters.I know some good Waterloo Computer Science co-op students this year don't have jobs in software. These are students from one of the best CS universities around. They've proven a lot just by getting in and surviving the first year. Now they need experience to help round out their course work and companies aren't hiring enough of them.
I hear a lot of complaints in startup land about how hard it is to find skilled developers. If you can't find them then it's time to start growing them and that takes work.
We've got three students right now and every one is contributing to the company and gaining confidence and skills and making themselves more marketable for the next work term. If you haven't been hiring co-ops now is a good time to have another look, lots of good people are available.
Here's three tips for finding, caring for and growing your co-ops:
- Plan for the long haul. Try to hire students you'd want to have return to you and get them early in their school career. Particularly as a smaller startup you're realistically not going to get the superstar senior students but you'll look pretty good to first years. Students aren't really going to have anything on their resumes that will impress you and their interview skills aren't well developed yet so you're going to have to stretch a bit in the interview process to find out who they are. Maybe they'll come back, maybe they won't, but either way you'll be helping them when they most need it and they'll talk about you back at school. You can improve your odds by making their experience a good one. We've been lucky enough to have some returning co-ops and it's been awesome.
- Take care of them while they're with you. Make sure they've got work they can accomplish, that you value and that you explain the value. You don't always have to give them something that's a great learning experience because everything is a great learning experience when they're starting out. Make sure the work is meaningful; no one wants to do busy work, but if they're doing something that other staff would normally have to do and that's freeing staff time for higher value work, that's a huge win for everyone. Make sure they understand why that's valuable and how they're contributing. Everyone likes to make a positive contribution, especially when they're just starting. One mistake I see some employers making is trying to give the students a challenging experience but if it may end up just undermining their confidence. Don't forget how many levels they're learning on: social, company culture, time commitments, communication, technical... For ThoughtWire, we try to provide students a mix of tasks that can be accomplished easily to build that sense of accomplishment, and more challenging technical work for skills development. Also, don't forget to check in frequently with them and be willing to help out. Feeding them is good too, everyone likes free food!
- Grow your co-op program over time. Think about moving from one student to a couple and then more. Having more than one student creates a small community within the organization in a good way; they can support each other and share tips. Work on refining your on-boarding experience for co-ops, which is usually a bit different than for full time folks. The effort spent here not only helps the incoming students it will also likely improve your standard on-boarding. Spend some time defining projects that you can give to students and create a backlog of work that you can draw on whenever you need it. Create some structure for the term with some defined milestones for you and the co-ops to touch base and see what's working and what isn't.
This is definitely a process. We're still making plenty of mistakes and working to improve our own co-op experience internally. But I'm proud of what we have accomplished and am looking forward to having more great students, hopefully from even more schools, working with us over the coming years. Hiring students is important and there's always too many reasons not to do it - dive in anyway, you'll be glad you did.
