The Naked Business: I hired from Twitter

by Doug Richard

Recently I felt overwhelmed. On an impulse a few weeks ago I sent out a tweet.

Can twitter find great people? I’m looking for an intern who, in return for small pay, will shadow me for 6 months and help with my work. 10:41 AM Jan 21st

I then decided to expand on that thought and added,

They should be able to think, to write, to present and be sharp and hungry. And they should want to learn about entrepreneurialism 10:42 AM Jan 21st

Realising this might create a bit of havoc. I decided to add some structure,

They can apply by tweeting me their CV. 140 characters worth. hope this works 10:43 AM Jan 21st

People began asking questions, like “Where would the job be based?” I replied,

The job would be based near London. No office. Mostly in London and Cambridge but also everywhere I go..UK, US, Europe

“When will I decide?”

When I find the right person. My inbox is over 2k. My opportunities will take 2 of me…i figure apprenticeship’s the way to go 4:22 PM Jan 21st

I received a lot of replies. Many were from people interested in the experiment and wanting to know how it was going. For me the experiment was not merely about finding someone to help me with my overflowing inbox but rather the latest in a long series of efforts on my part to find new and better ways of finding and growing talent.

Let me digress to explain. I have believed for a long time that the best way to add new talent is through apprenticeship and internships. I distinguish between the two. For my purposes an apprentice is someone who has the aptitude and the attitude but lacks the experience.  Our intent in hiring them is to progress them to a permanent role. By contrast, an intern is someone who also has the aptitude and the attitude and who also lacks the experience but who is joining us for a determined period of time and will then leave.

I have had interns and apprentices in most of my businesses for most of my life. At School for Startups (S4S) we have had interns from day one. They join us for 3+ months. They work full-time and we pay them approximately £200 per week, which is around the minimum wage.

I am not particularly comfortable with unpaid internships because I believe that it creates the wrong dynamic between the employee and the company. If we pay them nothing then we are asserting that is what their contribution is worth. Some people would counter that we are providing them with experience that they lack and that is adequate consideration. And it may well be. But money is different and I am much more comfortable telling someone to do boring work, or difficult work, or to ask them to do a better job or to give them negative feedback if it is a properly paid relationship. I have also found interns behave differently if they are being paid.

Overall, our interns have been a big success, whether they’ve just left secondary school or are recent university graduates. Interestingly, the addition of a university education has not been a relevant factor. (I am not dismissing the value of a university education, merely observing that the interns we have had have been equally useful prior to, and following their university education, which makes me believe that they simply continue to lack the common ingredient that we supply, experience).

It is my policy to glue an intern to one of my people who has too much on their plate and tell them to offload the least of the tasks they do to the intern with the understanding that I will still hold them responsible for the finished product or outcome. This of course, at the outset increases my poor employees workload; because, as any experienced manager will tell you, there is added effort in managing an inexperienced person.

In fact, that would have to be the case. The added effort by my employee, the mentor in effect, is precisely equal to the lack of experience that permits us to pay someone much less than someone who had the requisite experience.

But, if the intern has the right aptitude (the key talents to do the job) and the right attitude (they don’t drive everyone crazy), then they quickly become valuable. More interestingly they usually add a dimension to the jobs they are given because they are focussing wholly on something that was probably being done in a fast and careless fashion before they came along.

Given how much we like interns, the only shortcoming of the system is that they eventually leave. That is the point of internship, it assumes that they are using us just as we are using them. But of course, the company has changed as a result of them joining. They are now carrying part of the load, doing something well that was either done too quickly before or not at all.

Our solution has been to make it part of the interns jobs to hire their own successor. I have always asked them to hire someone better than themselves and to have an overlap of enough weeks so they can teach the next person all of the core elements of the position before they leave.

In theory, if each intern only hired someone better than themselves we would end up with one hell of an intern someday. But of course, that’s not the way it works out. And we have occasionally had very bad interns whom we have had to let go, quickly. But in general we have done well and they have done well.

I believe that many businesses could reach into their pocket and hire one intern. That many businesses could afford £800 per month. I think that the numbers are compelling. We have over one million un-employed young people fresh out of school or university. We can put many of them to productive work if every business that could afford to hire just one intern.

But I digress. I started this essay talking about my effort to hire on Twitter. I shall let you know how it went in my next post of The Naked Business.

Doug