How to write an appealing internship offer?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I have recently sent an internship proposition to my manager, to recruit an intern for next year.

The problem is that it's filled with technical considerations that I'm sure my manager appreciates, but it is certainly not something I would consider as appealing for any student. I'm pretty sure the subject is interesting, but how do I make it look appealing in the description?

• Do I include a list of tools (programming languages in this case) that are likely to be used? I don't want to have someone that has to learn from scratch a new language, but I'm open to suggestion concerning which language to use (among 2 or 3 though). I feel like listing the languages I have in mind could scare some student, thinking that they're proficient in only one language and not the others, so it wouldn't be a good match.

• Do I describe the internship at a task per task precision? That will show that I've given this subject some thought and have a good idea on how it should go, but there is a lot of tasks that I've identified, so it may scare someone thinking it will be too much work.

• Do I try to focus more on the output of the internship, like improving the team efficiency, developing the next reference code/tool/plugin in a certain field and topic?

The objective is to attract as many good candidates (graduate students (last year of engineering school in France)) as possible. I'm sure I have missed some topics.

manpreet 2 years ago

I'll start off by highlighting I'm not an engineer but a tech recruiter and the phrasing you have used is a bit different to here in Australia... but I would usually separate a "job advertisement" from a "job description". If you view the application and interview process as a funnel whereby you reduce and filter a broad range of potential candidates down to the very best - the role of your 1st stage, the job advertisement or 'offer' is about attraction and marketing. It should have the tone and information required to attract your initial wide pool of people. The actual level of detail that is best for you may vary depending on your audience, your position/ company requirement and the market conditions so in some cases I will go quite technical.

In terms of providing task-by-task level of detail, for intern/ junior roles I would usually use that after the initial broader communication. This might be sending the detailed spec / 'job description' document and information to candidates you invite to interview or introducing it to them during the later stages of the interview process.

Regarding specifying technologies when you are hiring for aptitude - just be clear at multiple stages and across both written and in person communication.

An example would be for one team at my company where I hire graduates and intern programmers who will be working with C# mainly. Because a lot of Australian universities do not teach / provide licenses for students to work with the .NET stack, we often look for people who have either Java experience but communicate they will be learning and working with C#. This might be similar to your situation in that what we are really looking for is strong aptitude with programming and understanding of OOP.