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110 How to Hire A-Players
they finish their degrees. Are there specific university programs that
fit well with your business? If so, introduce your company to the
directors of the program and create associations at the school. Jobs
you typically find difficult to fill may be perfect for this group.
Internships
One great way to expand your farm team and develop connections
with A-players is to create an internship program. Michael Vaughan
is vice president of sales for TicketLeap, a start-up company that
allows event organizers to sell tickets online. Mike and others at
the company have strong connections with the Wharton Business
School and other schools within the University of Pennsylvania.
They used these connections to develop an internship program
through which they hire a significant percentage of their full-time
employees. When the company had only 22 employees, 5 or 6 of
them were college interns, and another 3 or 4 of the full-timers had
started out as interns.
Here are Mike’s pointers on tapping into universities using
internships to find and hire A-players:
College students are trained to be researchers. Any job that you
can structure to be research oriented is a great fit for a college
student with intelligence and a strong work ethic.
When you hire students, you also tap into their network of
relationships. By creating a good internship program, you create
positive word of mouth that helps you to attract next year’s
interns.
The company’s executives must stay in touch with their university
contacts to make these programs really work. These relationships
help to increase your internship program’s visibility
at the school and help you to tap into other university-related
contacts who would be good employees.
Internships fit into a farm team recruiting strategy because you
are essentially trying people out before you hire them. It won’t
take more than a month or two for you to figure out who are the