So you have a brilliant idea and you’ve started working on it. Internally you’ve committed to it but you don’t have the money to hire hundreds of developers and business folk to help you. Here’s how you can do it for free – I know because I spent some time “happily” working for free.
The job market is getting even more competitive and many smart college students are finding it hard to find a summer internship – not to even mention a job. Furthermore, the real brilliant kids don’t want to spend countless hours working in a bank making powerpoints. This is where you come in. If you can offer these capable kids some real responsibility and something interesting for their resume that might just be enough, to make them work for you for next to nothing. The goal is to recruit smart people with skills you need. It might be a little harder to hire real developers, no matter their age. So if you can’t find someone with the exact skills you need, I’d recommend hiring people that have know the basics and show the capacity to learn on the job.
First create an honest description of your company but do it without compromising your “trade secrets”. Recruit straight from the top universities, sure there are brilliant people all over the world and being a student at Harvard doesn’t mean you are a genius. It is however a nice baseline to start from. Post your job ads on the school’s online job boards. Don’t limit this to seniors or juniors but allow both younger and older people to apply – many internships are looking for Juniors so that they can convert them to full employees when they graduate. This makes it harder for Sophomores and Masters students to find internships. Additionally, many Juniors are expecting a well paying internship while many Sophomores are simply looking for good experience. The most difficult part is weeding out the riff-raff and getting the real gems onboard. This requires a whole post in itself but to start…Conduct several interviews with the aim of judging the basics (intelligence, work ethic, and team skills) and also their entrepreneurial spirit and maturity level.
Try to keep your interns happy. Actually, don’t call them interns give them some sort of glamorous titles (Business Development Associates). Also provide them with job coaching/advice and possibility to come onboard once your company becomes the next big thing. To cut down on expenses – allow the self starters to work from home. The rest you can let work from your home. Finally most people don’t want to work entirely for free – least you can do is reimburse them for their transportation expenses and try to bring in lunch once in a while to keep the morale up.
If you execute this strategy carefully and successfully – you can have a team of 2-10 interns. They can be working for you from all over the country if not the world. But have no managing these folks is a hard job and the more people you bring on, the less time you will have to do things yourself. But if done right the overall company productivity will multiply 10x fold. (I am just throwing out a random number here but you get the point.) All for just a few hundred dollars.
