Our 2015 summer internship program was a disaster. My company, HireTeamMate/Hiretual, hired one software engineering intern after another — failure after failure — but on paper they seemed perfect for us.
We needed more engineering power to speed up development of some tools to spread our growing brand across the digital world, getting more sign-ups and eyeballs to our then employee referral platform. We hired engineering students from UC Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT who accepted near entry-level engineering salaries. But they quickly lost interest in their projects because our product was just another “job board.” Within a few weeks of their arrival we had only one intern left.
