#StartupJobs #InternshipTrends #FreshVsExperienced
Hey there! 👋 Have you noticed the shift in hiring practices at startups lately? I’ve been pondering on whether startups lean towards experienced staff rather than offering opportunities to freshers or interns. Why is that? Could it be that startups value the expertise that experienced professionals bring, or is it more about the specific roles they need to fill? I’m curious to hear your take on this! Do you think interns could also make a significant impact in a startup’s growth journey in the long run? Let’s chat about it! 💬 #StartupInsights #HiringDecisions
Generally, the most successful startups prioritize expertise and fit with their first 5-10 hires. That period is super critical and can determine the success of the company for the long term. 10-50 employees you’ll see some less experienced folks get tasked with grunt work, building out the sales and customer success teams, etc. At that point, things change a little bit. Executives are thinking even more strategically and can hand off the tactical-type work. Once you hit about 100-200 employees you start thinking about employer branding and how to continue to attract top talent. You start thinking about the long game (what’s this company going to look like in 5-10 years).
Once that comes into focus then you start calculating the ROI of your recruiting activities. Turns out, interns, while they don’t contribute much *during* their short internship, ultimately have an extremely high ROI. An internship is effectively a company paying $5-10k to figure out if an employee is worth investing in for the long term. If yes, that hire will be even more quickly accretive to the success of the company, since they already know how things operate post-internship. A mis-hire without an internship can be detrimental to the growth of the company. Internships help avoid these.
Long story short, [startup internships can be hard to come by](https://www.talentramp.co/), but are mutually beneficial for everyone involved.
As a founder who started three different ventures, I have always prioritized hiring experienced professionals for the core team of initial hires. The rationale behind this strategy is that as the founder, I bring the fresh perspective. What I need from my team is the ability to execute this vision rapidly and effectively, especially when startups are under resource constraints and immense pressure to scale quickly.
Having said that, I have always had interns at slightly later stages, usually when our product was launched and we had revenue. This was also done with the heart of helping students experience the startup world and get work experience then to necessarily get value out of them. My companies did end up hiring 1 in 5 interns; having that relationship and knowing work habits and culture made it much easier to hire interns we liked than someone applying with their resume.
The startup I used to work for outsourced task a lot, especially tech related tasks to this particular platform rocketdevs. They already had pre-vetted and experienced devs, so it saved the company a whole lot of money
It depends a ton on the role. For lower level sales, I way prefer people who are fresh to the role. I’ve seen way too many people with experience that are just done trying hard.