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Freshview interns produce the goods!
Posted by David Greiner on March 28, 2008 10:17 AM
When we launched our intern program last year, we had high hopes for success, but no real idea of how it was going to work out. Now that the first program has been run, we wanted to let you all know how it was arranged, what the experience was like and what the outcomes were.
Choosing the right people
We had quite a few promising applications from prospective interns, so the first step was to find the best candidates. We used a process of phone screening adapted from the one Joel Spolsky has spoken about to pick the people who seemed to be the most suitable, the best fit and who were available when we needed them to be.
That got us down to 5 really strong possibilities, and we invited them all to come into our offices in Sutherland for a few hours. At that time we were mid-build on the fancy new offices so the day was held partially in the old office, and partially in the new one.
We ran it on a Saturday, which worked better for the potential interns who had varying University schedules, and most of the Freshview team was involved in meeting the applicants. After an introductory chat we split into groups, and the interview process was started.
Each applicant did a short written programming task, met with the Ben and Jason our developers and also chatted with the Dave and I, on the design, marketing and support side. The idea was to get a good idea of both technical and communication skills, and of that nebulous concept of 'fit'.
Finally, we retired downstairs for a catered lunch over the ping pong table, where we all chatted and we had a chance to see how everyone interacted. It was a tough decision, but a few days later we offered internships to Dan and Toby.
We know what the interns did last summer
In December Toby and Dan joined us to start their 8 week program. As promised, they were involved pretty much right away in working on actual features for Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. We always have plenty of ideas and plans for our products, and having two smart developers suddenly available meant we could release some cool new stuff.
Here are just some of the features coded up almost totally by Toby and Dan, based on customer requests, internal priorities and their own input. They worked to flexible specs that left them plenty of room to show their skills.
- Subscriber snapshots - a great new way to see how an individual recipient has opened, clicked or otherwise acted on all the emails you have sent to them.
- Exporting segments - this was a very popular request and makes it easy for people to pull out different groups of people, like RSVPs or inactive subscribers.
- Automatic plain text version - Kick start your plain text emails by pulling all the text out of your HTML version instantly
- Generate inline styles - another huge time saver, this one lets you design with styles in the head of your page, and have them automagically made inline when importing. Great for Gmail recipients.
- Campaign comparison - A super slick way to take reports from two or more of your campaigns, and compare opens, clicks, bounces and more, in a new Flash chart format.
Those boys sure earned their money! There was still plenty of time for fun though, and Toby and Dan more than held their own during the Freshview surfing lessons and Christmas party laser tag.
At the end of their time with us, all agreed that it had been well worthwhile, both for the interns themselves to experience working in a software company, and for us at Freshview who got a lot more work done, and a chance to see some young developers in action. In fact, we've since employed one of our interns who will be working with us part time while finishing his degree up, and hopefully beyond.
2008 intern program - are you interested?
We're going to be running the intern program again this year, and we'll be looking for another 2 or 3 undergraduate computer science students to join us for 8 to 12 weeks. It's a paid program run over the summer, and as you can see there is plenty of scope to do cool things, learn a lot and have some fun.
Head over to the Annual Internship Program page, where you can add your email address to get notified when applications open. We're looking forward to meeting some of you!
Got anything to add?