My company, Awesome Inc, has one of the most competitive internship application processes I’ve seen. It’s a four-step process, with each step getting progressively harder. I’ve had a lot of friends (with good paying jobs) tell me that there is no way they would go through the Awesome Inc internship interview process for a high-paying, salaried job, much less for an unpaid internship. I’d argue that in a lot of cases, landing the right (competitive) internship can be more valuable (or at least lead to being more valuable) than a high-paying, salaried job…even if the internship doesn’t pay you a dime in cash.

One of the most important parts of keeping an internship valuable, is keeping it competitive. Quality interns want other quality interns around them. So we’ve built a process that filters and selects the highest potential people for our team. And along the way, we ensure that the applicant fits our culture by testing them against each of our 4 core values:

Step 1: Online written application (tests CV #1: Be Good and CV #2: Be Excellent) - We use Google Forms for this. You can see our online application here. We use this step to determine the applicant’s skills, experience, and why they are applying for the internship. The most important question in the online application - “Show us something awesome you’ve done?”. It’s easy to talk about what skills you may (or may not) have. What we really want to see though is what an applicant has already built.

Step 2: Online video application (tests CV #3: Be a Friend and CV #4: Be You) - We use WePow’s online video interview tool for this stage. This step is all about determining culture fit. We ask questions like, “Tell us about your best friend” and “How weird are you?”. The online interview challenges the applicant to think on their toes under a time constrained response. It also saves us a ton of time by not having to schedule interviews - we just send them to the link, they complete the online video interview (or not) and we watch it when it’s most convenient to us. Beautiful.

Step 3: In person interview (tests CV #1: Be Good, CV #3: Be A Friend and CV #4: Be You) - For those that make it to an in person interview, we still need to evaluate two things - A. Were they faking it through steps 1 & 2? and B. Can they execute? There are certain things you can read about an applicant in person that you can’t determine from paper or a video recording. How is their non-verbal communication? Are they confident, but not arrogant? Do they communicate well when put on the spot?

Step 4: FIO task (test CV #2: Be Excellent) - FIO stands for ‘Figure It Out’. This stage of the interview process is all about execution. If the applicant has proven that they are a good culture fit and has the experience we are looking for, we just need to see that they can execute on the tasks we give them and can they do it independently. When we give an applicant a FIO task, we assign them a project to complete under a 1-2 week deadline. They have all the instructions they need and are expected to complete the FIO task without asking any questions of our team. The FIO task typically lines up with the type of work they would be doing at Awesome Inc. So, if an applicant wants to join our video production team, then they get assigned a video to create.

Our interns are awesome. We know that game recognizes game. Our hiring process is intense and competitive because that is the type of intern that we want to attract. Our interns go on to do awesome things after Awesome Inc like work at Facebook, Google, The Cartoon Network, or start companies of their own. Ever since we launched our internship program in 2009, it’s been one of our proudest accomplishments to recruit, select, and retain high-quality talent.

In my follow-up blog post, I’ll talk about how we go about retaining this talent even when they have other high potential, and high paying options on the table.