Year: 2011

“The Perks Were Too Good” Insights From A Google Product Manager

Ever wonder why someone would leave Google, despite the company having one of the strongest employment brands in the world?

Maneesh Arora decided to leave after spending close to a decade as a product manager at the tech juggernaut, working on interesting projects like Google Health, Google Maps and more.   After Google he spent 7 months at Zynga before pursuing his true interest of being an investor and tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley.

Maneesh offers insights into why Google was one of the best jobs he has ever had, and why this also made it one of the hardest places to leave and ultimately challenged him from following is true career interests.  His advice?  Take risks early, optimize for working on challenging projects and with people smarter than you, and don’t chase titles.

Maneesh spoke for an hour on Stanford’s campus as part of our FYF series. FYF brings current and former executives from companies including HP, Amazon, Google, Zynga, and more to speak on campuses. To View Part 1 Featuring Dave Schappell click here.  To view Part 2 Featuring Mike Su click here.

Watch the 6 minute highlight video or the full video below.
Highlights

The Full Presentation:

The Applicants (Killing the Cover Letter)

cover letterLast week InternMatch posted opportunities for 30 internships at top Silicon Valley startups, all in Dave McClures portfolio.   We are posting the applicants’ work here as it comes in.

Feel free to reach out to these candidates — we will put up a big  #GotHIRED hashtag next to their name once they’ve been taken off the market, so don’t hesitate, or it may be too late:

5/7/2011 – Raymond Sin just graduated from Berkeley, with an interest in Real Estate and entrepreneurship.  He has great experience in marketing, social media, and building relationships.

5/3/2011 Jonathan Lau (#GotHIRED) — Looking for a social media expert, who can write killer content and hustle to launch campaigns?  Jon is UC San Diego Student majoring in Anthropology and with an incredible sense for marketing, pr and social media.  For his application he is writing a series of 3 blogs on why he would be a great fit for your startup company.  He is talented and gets what its like to work in a fast-paced, hectic startup environment.  Contact Jon via linkedin here!

Blog 1: http://bit.ly/mnRmA2

Blog 2: http://bit.ly/jwaeI8

Blog 3: http://bit.ly/jzsXS4

4/23/2011 Simon Stolz (simon@simonstolz.de) designed a beautiful Facebook page that makes an ordinary cover letter seem laughable.  This is an incredible piece of work — get a glimpse of Simon’s design, creativity, and marketing savvy here and move fast to hire him before someone else does.

4/17/2011 Isaac Elias (@brainscraps) has been working has been obsessed with entrepreneurship for a while now.  How did he promote his application?  During Startup Weekend San Jose, as he was pitching his company (see time 11:30), he got a hoarde of tweeps to tweet for him.  Brilliant use of Twitter to get endorsements + the business he made is cool as well — Two Cents is customer surveys that don’t suck!  Tweet at him to setup an interview @brainscraps.

4/17/2011 DJ Samson is an entrepreneur out of NY Institute of Technology looking for a great startup to prove his salt this summer.  Check out his about.me page to learn more.

4/14/2011 Sumedh Jigjinni (#GotHIRED) — Designer, marketer, hustler, and a sense of humor?  Sumedh is the ultimate startup intern, check out the site he made instead of a cover letter, which has been making waves on twitter!

4/13/2011  Bri Anne Ramsey (brianneramsey@mail.utexas.edu) —  Bri made this ad, enough said!

4/13/2011  Blair Lockhart (blockh3@tigers.lsu.edu) — Blair Lockhart is an active blogger, designer, and photographer who also loves coffee.  View her blog here.

4/12/2011 Jerry Roback (@robackjerry) —  Jerry is a tech whiz, marketer, and futurist.  He put together this awesome website for an application.

4/11/2011   Sohail Prasad’s Application (#GotHIRED) — Sohail says, “Technology is my passion, entrepreneurship is my game.”  He was named TCU’s Youth Entrepreneur of the year in 2010.

4/11/2011 Crystal Cyan’s Application (@crystalcy) (#GotHIRED) — Crystal is a tri-lingual social entrepreneur and co-founder of the Social Startup Summit.  She is a designer, blogger, and entrepreneur.

4/11/2011 Collin West’s Application (@collinrwest) (#GotHIRED) — Collin is studying entrepreneurship and innovation at the Kellogg School of Business.  See his blog here and his about.me profile here.

More Creative Apps Coming Soon…

Dave Schappell — “It took me from 1990 to 1998 to actually pursue a job I wanted to be in.”

This is the first of InternMatch’s Find Your Focus speaker series.  Find Your Focus is looking to be the TEDx of student career advice.  We bring executives from top companies around the country including Amazon, HP, Google, Zynga and more to share their unique career insights.

Dave Schappell is a former Amazon product manager, professional poker player, micro-finance industry leader, and current CEO of TeachStreet.com, one of Seattle’s most successful startup companies.  In his presentation, Dave covers everything from the cost-benefits of surfing and smoking pot at the beach, to why he left Amazon even as the company was growing into an e-commerce titan.

Dave covers the tough topics, offering honest insight into why it is so hard to find and pursue a career you love.   We hope you enjoy Dave’s career insights and feel free to share your feedback about the presentation and what you would like to hear more of in the future:

An Intro to Dave Schappell:

Dave Schappell Career Advice

Welcome to Demo Days: InternMatch Launches a New Face

Today marks the beginning of demo days at 500 Startups.  For those of you not fully engrossed in the tech world (I know I certainly spent more time on ESPN than TechCrunch in college), this is a BIG day.  InternMatch and 21 other companies will be presenting today and tomorrow to over 100 different investors, a slew of reporters, and other tech leaders.   I will be giving updates here as I frequently as I can,  but first some big news:

career fair

InternMatch Gets a New Face:

InternMatch has been working with Seattle’s top design firm, Urban Influence, to give our site a look that keeps the simplicity  of InternMatch that everyone loves, but makes the process of finding internships and interns more fun and engaging.

So stop reading and check out the new site!  After giving it a look, let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Not every page has been re-worked, as we are looking for some feedback before doing a full launch.  Consider this a Sneak Peak, as the site will continue to get more awesome, with new features and resources over the next month.  Be sure to keep checking in to see what else is new at InternMatch and thanks to everyone who has used and supports InternMatch.  We are going to keep working hard to make the internship process easier and more fun.

 

Is Your Internship Legal?

Legal Issues Interns Should be Aware of

By John Richards, Guest Blogger, LegalMatch

In college or graduate school, choice internships are often some of the most coveted and competitive educational opportunities. If you’re in a field of study that’s going to produce thousands of graduates every year, most of whom have nearly identical credentials, every little thing you can do to set yourself apart from your peers matters, especially early in your career.

However, whether you’re aware of it or not, a huge number of legal issues swirl around the employer-intern relationship.

Most of these issues involve employment and labor law – particularly regulations concerning wages and hours. In general, if a person is hired by an employer, and does useful work for them, the employer has to pay that person at least minimum wage, and many interns do work that’s definitely useful to their employers, without collecting any direct compensation.

However, when you’re living on student loans, and are primarily concerned with building your resume and obtaining useful experience in your chosen field, presumably to give yourself an edge when you’re competing for jobs after graduation, you might not really care if your internship pays or not. And in the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with that. People make these kinds of value judgments all the time, and should be free to do so. However, what about students who simply can’t afford to do an unpaid internship?

Many students have no choice but to spend their summers working whatever paid job they can find. This is often menial work, which does nothing to boost a resume. If they have to work full time just to make ends meet, these students probably won’t have the time to do an unpaid internship on top of it, which puts less-affluent students at a significant disadvantage. After all, students with wealthy parents can get as many unpaid experience as they like, without having to worry about buying groceries or making rent.

Last year, the New York Times ran a story covering this very issue, and noted how the culture of unpaid internships might perpetuate wealth inequality, by ensuring that rich college students are able to pursue work experience far more easily than their less-wealthy classmates.

It’s pretty clear that many private, for-profit employers come extremely close to violating state and federal labor laws when it comes to hiring unpaid interns. Generally, if an intern is doing economically-useful work for the employer, that would ordinarily be done by a paid employee, they are subject to federal wage and hour laws. On the other hand, if the company receives little economic advantage from the intern, and the intern receives significant training and education from the job, it’s likely acceptable to not pay the intern.

But if you’re working at an unpaid internship, especially if it’s with an organization that’s extremely well-regarded in your chosen field, do you really care that your relationship with your employer arguably places you within the legal definition of an employee, and therefore entitles you to a wage? Probably not. And I’m all for letting consenting adults (the intern and the employer) make these types of arrangements, as long as the terms are clear from the beginning.

This doesn’t change the fact, however, that this system arguably favors the affluent, thereby perpetuating wealth inequality. Something should be done about this, but it’s very difficult to figure out exactly what. It involves a balancing act of several important, competing interests: freedom to contract, equal opportunity, and wide availability of internship positions.

For example, if we required that all internships pay at least minimum wage, this will in theory allow more people to pursue these positions, but companies will not be able to offer as many positions as they could before, which isn’t good for anybody.

On the other hand, this country tends to value equal opportunity, and there’s really no denying that a student who is just scraping by financially, and has no choice but to work at some menial job full-time during his or her summers, will be at a significant competitive disadvantage upon graduation, through no fault of his or her own.

I’ve proposed before that perhaps full-time internships should be required to pay at least minimum wage, or at least those that are at private, for-profit companies. This would allow far more students to pursue these opportunities, thereby leveling the playing field, and increasing the likelihood that the most talented and driven workers will enter their chosen field.

To ensure that internships aren’t priced into scarcity (the laws of economics apply to the labor market as much as any other market, after all), non-profit organizations should probably be exempt from the requirement that they pay their interns, or the pay requirement should be below the minimum wage, provided that interns are actually doing substantive, educational work, and not simply filling in for a paid employee.

The same rules that apply to non-profit organizations should apply to part-time internships. This would ensure that such opportunities are still widely available, and allow interns to work another part-time job to pay the bills.

There are no perfect solutions to this issue, and I don’t pretend that the solutions I’ve proposed would create a perfect system. However, I do think that they strike a pretty good balance between economic freedom, and equal opportunity.

John Richards writes on a variety of legal issues for LegalMatch.com and the LegalMatch.com Law Blog. The above material is intended for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice to assist you with your particular situation. No two factual situations are alike, and if you require legal advice, you should speak with an attorney licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.

How to Make Yourself EASY to Hire! – Guest Blog by Eric Koester

Eric Koester is the VP of Operations and General Counsel at Appature, one of the largest marketing consulting companies for the Health Care industry.  Eric has made hiring decisions on student interns throughout his career and in this post Eric offers novel advice on exactly what steps you NEED to take to get your foot in the door.  There is no better place to get internship advice then directly from the mouth of an experienced hiring manager — enjoy these internship insights from Eric Koester!

How to Make Yourself EASY to Hire!

An internship can be an outstanding opportunity for you to learn more about a company AND for the company to learn more about you.  But getting that internship is the first step…

When you are being hired, usually the person doing the hiring is busy.  So remember that you’ve only got one shot to impress them and doing the “wrong” things can be an immediate turnoff.  I’ve hired numerous interns over the last few years and have identified a few key things that intern candidates do that make my job of screening candidates more difficult.  And whenever you make the job of the person looking to hire you difficult, you risk not getting the interview and ultimately the job.

So here’s my list of key things to do to make yourself easy to hire.

1. Always include your GPA.

There is lots of conflicting advice about putting your GPA on your resume.  However, if you are applying for an internship, you should always list your GPA.  There are only a few things we can evaluate an intern on and GPA is one of them.  Just because it isn’t as high as you’d like, don’t hide from it.  Instead, find ways to list your overall GPA and then highlight your GPA in specific courses or your major.  But don’t hide your GPA – when I’ve got numerous candidates, I have automatically stricken anyone that didn’t list their GPA.

2. One Page Resume.

I’ll be honest, for an internship, I rarely (if ever) read what you’ve listed on the second or third page of a resume.  Focus on what’s most important and cut out the rest so your resume fits on one page.

3. Misspellings are an automatic ‘no.’

You are putting your best foot forward in your  resume and cover letter.  And if that “best foot” has misspellings, then I can only imagine what the work will be like when you work for me.  Don’t count on Spell Check either… it can’t catch things like the difference between ‘their’ and ‘there.’

4. Show you know something about my business/company.

No one likes form letters – whether they are from credit card companies or from job applicants.  Candidates that tell me in the first paragraph of their resume/cover letter about why they want to work at our company go to the top of my list.

5. Be careful about what you say.

I’ve seen phrases like, “You’re making a big mistake if you don’t hire me;” “I’m the perfect candidate;” or “You won’t find a harder worker than me.”  I appreciate confidence, but remember that phrases like that may backfire.  Be confident, but not cocky.

While getting an internship may be a challenge, you can make the process much easier by making the job of the hiring manager simpler.  Look to these key tips to help make my job simpler and get yourself one step closer to obtaining that internship.

So make yourself EASY to hire… that’s the first step to get hired!

Eric Koester is the Vice President of Operations for Appature (www.appatureinc.com), a software company providing leading marketing software solutions to the healthcare industry located in Seattle, Washington.  You can read more at Eric’s blog at www.myhightechstartup.com.  Follow @erickoester!