Show Notes
This episode ended up being much more about how to increase workforce diversity than how to hire interns. Here’s a quick rundown:
- Tyler and his team at Less Annoying CRM want to increase diversity
- They primarily source candidates via their summer internship program
- Tyler and his team have had great success at WashU with this model
- However, this has led to a lack of diversity across his 17 employees (~50% went to WashU)
- Tyler wants more internships to come from schools other than WashU
- Despite effort, Tyler has not been able to replicate the internship funnel at other schools in Missouri
- E.g. He’s tried recruiting via career fairs, by connecting with professors, and by partnering with student groups
- Tyler pointed out that WashU is successful is due to the numerous former WashU graduate success stories that currently work or formerly worked at Less Annoying CRM
- I.e. They have product-market fit at WashU for their internship offering
- However, at other schools, they can’t even get students to apply
- I.e. They don’t know if they have the right internship offering yet
- Rick recommended Tyler focus on customer development to learn more about what the students at these other colleges are looking for
- Tyler realized that creating diversity is really hard, and focusing on small wins initially is key
Takeaways include:
- Internships provide a safe way to hire because they allow you to work with someone temporarily before you extend a full-time offer
- Summer internships, by their nature, discriminate in favor of privilege
- Private schools have a culture that encourages summer internships; Public schools don’t seem to have this same focus.
- One challenge is that college students, privileged or not, are not very responsive
- When working to increase diversity, focusing on small wins up front is key. Once you get your foot in the door with a new segment, it gets much easier from there.
The problem
Tyler: All right, let's dive into the topic for today. So this one is mine. So basically we're going to talk about how to recruit interns. And I can give a little background on where I'm coming from with this topic. Basically at
Less Annoying CRM, so we have 17 employees, but we've hired significantly more than that in total because every summer we have about 10-ish interns, or coding fellows, which coding fellows and interns are about the same thing here.
Tyler: Basically college students who come for the summer. We've had a lot of success with this. It makes hiring really easy because you get to take risks on people kind of and bring in a bunch of people. And then if someone's really a perfect fit, give them a full-time offer to work here after they graduate. So have had a lot of success with that. Really enjoy it. And I kind of have a system worked out, which maybe one thing we should talk about today is just what's currently working. Like Rick, you went to Duke, I went to WashU. That type of place has an intern culture. Students are planning on applying for these, it's expected. Other universities in the area don't have that culture. And we've struggled to get students interested in it, which is kind of counter intuitive because they're schools where the fact that they're paid internships and it's a really great opportunity. You'd think it'd be even more appealing to someone who's not going to as top tier of a school. But the reality is we really struggle to get anyone from those other schools even to apply. So the results-
Rick: Sorry, what are they doing instead?
Tyler: Yeah, it's a combination of things. Part of it is a lot of these schools, people aren't full-time students as much and so they're not off for the summer in the same way. So that's one challenge. And then the other thing is, I think if you're going to a $60,000 a year private university, probably you come from wealth and probably you kind of have options. And you're like, "I'm going to dabble and try different things and see where my life takes me." If you're going to, for example, the local public university, UMSL, University of Missouri-St. Louis, still a good school. But if you go there probably you're like, "I need a job out of this." And you're majoring in whatever you're majoring in and you're not looking for random other opportunities that aren't specifically in your field.
Rick: Sorry, I interrupted you when you were describing the problem. I'll let you finish that.
A lack of diversity, starting with interns
Tyler: Yeah. Okay. Sorry, I'm rambling here. I'm basically done. But basically we have a model that works for hiring interns at WashU. We don't have a model that works elsewhere and the result of this is our employee base lacks diversity in any number of ways. First of all, there's kind of socioeconomic diversity of only rich kids go to WashU. And then also WashU has its own diversity problems in terms of race, in terms of gender, at least on the technical side. So we're not getting a very diverse applicant pool because of the way we're recruiting interns. So I'm interested in discussing how can we go out and attract interns from other universities that maybe don't have that strong of an intern culture.
Rick: Got it. So diversify your interns?
Tyler: Yes. Exactly.
Rick: The problem is you lack diversity with your interns, you've been trying to increase that, you haven't been able to for a number of different reasons, which we'll probably go into later. I'm very interested in what you're... I think you're right. I think it should start with how you do interns. What the intern period is, what you're paying, what you're offering and what's going well so far with those.
How Less Annoying CRM does internships
Tyler: Cool. Okay. So the history here, so a lot of people probably haven't heard of WashU, but in terms of price and difficulty to get into, it's kind of like a top 15 top 20 university. Lots of rich kids, people with high test scores, right?
Rick: It's the best school that no one knows about.
Tyler: Yeah, it's probably there. It's on par with the Northwestern. Except you've heard of Northwestern and you haven't heard it WashU.
Rick: Exactly. I remember when one of my buddies in high school got into WashU and he was so excited. He was running around. This is a Charlotte private high school. He's running running around the halls going, "I got into WashU, I got in WashU." Everybody's like, "What is WashU? The University of Washington? You're going to go the West Coast?"
Tyler: Or George Washington.
Rick: "What are you talking about?"
Tyler: Yeah, so no one's heard of it, but it's a pretty good school, which comes with all the downsides of good schools. So I did what every first time entrepreneur does, which is the first time I had to hire people, I was like, "I don't know. I'm going to go back to the school I went to. And I already know people there and I'm going to start recruiting." And it was pretty easy. Basically we posted on there, every university has a free job board and any employer can sign up and post there. We went to the career fair. People walk by, we grab them and say, "Hey, do you want to do this thing?" That was basically it to start with. Since then we've increased our presence at WashU quite a bit. We partner with a few student groups.
Rick: Before you go into how you're marketing and recruiting interns, can you step back, I don't really understand what your intern offering is. Is it a once a year type thing? Is it a full-time job? Is it paid, unpaid? Do you have different types of internships? Different time periods? This kind of things.
Tyler: Right. Good question. So thus far we've always done it during the summer. I think we'd be willing to adjust that if that affects kind of diversity and other schools type of thing. But we've so far only done it for the summer. We have three main internships we hire for. One is CRM coach internship, which is basically the customer facing side of the business. It's most like customer service. So one of the challenges, I mean talk about, no one majors in customer service, which is tough. Another one is a software engineering internship, just a more traditional computer science major type of thing. And then the third one is the coding fellowship, where we teach people to code. So people who primarily don't know how to code or barely do, come in and they don't work for us, we teach them how to code.
Rick: So sorry, what's the difference between the second and the third one?
Tyler: The second is a computer science major who already knows what they're doing and they come in and work for the company. Like, "We need this feature, go build it." That type of thing. The coding fellowship is a psych major, who has no clue how to code and they come in and they never do any work for us.
Rick: And do you pay them?
Tyler: Yes. So we've increased both of these this year. So interns get $3,000 a month starting next summer. One of the reasons we increased it by the way, is for people who would otherwise have jobs they'd have to leave or something. I think the more we pay, the more appealing this is. But interns get 3000 a month, coding fellows get 1800 a month. So yes, they're both paid. But interns are definitely more like that's a job. Coding fellows, it's almost like summer camp or something. But you still get the same experience basically.
Rick: And sorry, remind me, I blanked on what you're paying fellowships.
Tyler: $1,800 a month.
Rick: $1,800 okay. Wow. That's a lot of money.
Tyler: We almost doubled it this year. It wasn't that much before.
Rick: So can we take coding fellowships off the table for a second and focus just on your internships. So these are people who have the mindset of, "I'm going to go work and get real work experience for a limited amount of time." What are the months?
Tyler: Mid to late May, through to early to mid-August. So a little under three months.
Rick: Okay. So let's call it three months. And are they nine to five, Monday through Friday?
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: So full-time?
Tyler: It's the exact same deal as a full time employee, there can be some flexibility there, but most people choose to be nine to five. Yeah.
Rick: Cool. And are they W2 employees during that time?
Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rick: Okay, interesting. So you're basically hiring someone for three months?
Tyler: Yes, exactly.
The pitch to interns
Rick: Right now, what's your current value proposition to someone? Well two things. First, what is your goal with offering the intern as an organization? And second, why is that beneficial to these people who you're pitching?
Tyler: Yeah, so the pitch varies based on whether it's software engineer or CRM coach. The software engineers, it's really easy because you're majoring computer science. We live in a time where everybody wants to work at a tech startup. That's very in the zeitgeist right now. So we're just like, "This is what you want. We offer it." St. Louis doesn't have a ton of startups that actually have paid internships, so it's a pretty easy pitch. What we get out of it there, is we do hope maybe we can hire some of those people, but a software engineer intern coming in, getting paid 3000 a month for a summer, they're probably productive enough that just the work we get out of them is worth it. In particular we have all these little things that our full-time engineers, they never have time to get to and it's nice. Like last summer we had three dev interns come in and just knock out a ton of little things that we had on our list.
Rick: So it is valuable to you, work actually does get done?
Tyler: Yes. This was the first summer that was true. In the past that wasn't. But I think we're getting more of a name for ourselves and getting more top tier people. And college students are impressive, they can come in and produce.
Rick: Especially if they go to WashU?
Tyler: Yeah, it might be less true if we're... And I think the best student at UMSL is as good as the best student at WashU, but the average is probably higher at WashU.
Rick: Sorry, what's UMSL?
Tyler: UMSL is the public school in St. Louis. University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Rick: Okay, got it. All right, so you've got an internship program that works for privilege.
Tyler: Yeah, for privilege. And I would actually say I'm less interested in how to hire the devs. The CRM coaches is like, if I could get my wish and get one of these to really start working somewhere else, it would be CRM coaching. And that's a lot harder one because they're not already looking for this internship.
Rick: Can I ask you why do you feel like you need to... It sounds like it's working. Let me just say that it sounds like you have a great internship program. It sounds like it's working and growing. Why aren't you just continuing to grow within WashU and tap that out before you worry about diversifying?
Tyler: Well, I mean I guess it depends on what you mean by tap that out. It's because diversity in and of itself is a goal here. So for example, I'd say the company right now is maybe half WashU, half non WashU grads. The people who aren't from WashU have like, I don't want to say complained, they're not being malcontents. But they basically said like, "When you come in here, it is a WashU culture and it's not very welcoming."
Rick: What does that mean?
Tyler: Like you're sitting at lunch and everyone's like, "Oh, can you believe what Chancellor Wrighton did?" And nobody else knows who Chancellor Wrighton is.
Rick: Who the heck is Chancellor?
Tyler: He's actually not the chancellor anymore at WashU, but he was. So, I don't know who the new one is. But the point is there's kind of, it almost feels like an extension of like, "I graduated and now I'm just going to the WashU postgraduate experience at Less Annoying." Which is not very welcoming for other people. We don't want a culture that excludes people. There's just an elitism thing. There's all kinds of reasons why diversity I think is desirable in its own right.
Rick: So the internship that you offer is working in terms of attracting talent and it's growing every year. And it's actually becoming a return on investment in terms of money, versus work getting done, which wasn't true in the past, but it's failing on bringing in non-private school privileged people?
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: Okay.
Tyler: And that's especially true on the CRM coaching side, versus the software engineering side.
Rick: Why is that you think?
Jobs and majors
Tyler: I think it's because, back to that thing I said earlier, if you're going to a school that's not full of rich kids, you're thinking, I need to get a job out of this. A good job is programming, people know that. The people who are the best fit for CRM coaches are English majors, and women and gender studies majors, and these types of majors that are really popular at expensive private liberal arts schools and not as common if you're... You wouldn't go to a community college and major in English as much probably. So it's kind of even more of a privilege to be like, "I'm just this amazing writer with no other practical skills basically."
Rick: Do you believe that there are people at the school who would like to be CRM coaches at Less Annoying CRM, if they knew about it?
Tyler: Yeah, I mean I certainly think so. We pay really, really well, compared to other job opportunities. It's a good work environment. I don't want to make it sound like we've never had any success finding interns like this. We have and they've, they've loved it, but we don't have a repeatable process for this.
Rick: So what are the roadblocks to make... I don't understand why this isn't working. It seems like you've got the best gig in town.
Tyler: Yeah. I think we do a for the right type of person. The challenge is this and the reason I wanted to bring this up with you specifically Rick, I think we kind of have a common pattern of my topics where I say, "You know how to do marketing and sales and stuff like that. Let's apply that to this. It's not exactly marketing but it kind of is." So what happens is we go to a career fair, at WashU you go to a career fair, that's all you need to do. People come up to you and talk to you and all that.
Rick: They're actively looking for internships for the summer? That's what they're there for.
Tyler: Right, exactly. There's a culture that everyone's supposed to do an internship. When you go to the other schools, and I want to be very clear, these other schools are still good schools. I'm not trying to shit on them or anything. But it doesn't have the elitist East Coast prep school vibe. And people aren't necessarily thinking like, "Oh I have to go get an internship." They're thinking, "I want to go get just a random job or something."
Rick: Like what?
Tyler: Well, I think most people probably during the summers between college, they're probably working at Target or something. But one big difference is they're probably also working there during the school year. WashU students for the most part, they work during the summer. They don't work during the school year. They go into $200,000 in debt, whatever. At these other schools, it's like they want kind of a job that they can have throughout college. That's one challenge. A lot of them aren't full-time students, so they might take two or three classes a semester, but at night or something like that. So they don't fit the intern schedule as well. But the biggest thing is they come to the career fair and they just don't even look at us because we're not what they had in mind. So I think we have to actually market to them. We have to get in front of them other ways.
Who’s the ideal person for the job
Rick: I think it comes down to you said that who the right person is for the job. And I think when you describe that person, that's probably going to answer a lot of questions because that person probably is pretty easy to find at WashU relative to the masses. They come and you know where they hang out, but at the larger school, their needles in haystacks.
Tyler: Yeah. They still exist but there's not this obvious place to go for them.
Rick: Yes. So who is the ideal person for this? It sounds like you want to talk about not the coding fellowship, but the customer-
Tyler: The CRM coach, yeah, intern.
Rick: For this episode, let's focus on the CRM coaching and simplify. So who's the ideal candidate for the CRM coach?
Tyler: Yeah, so I'll tell you who it has been, but I want to acknowledge up front it's possible there's a lot of bias built into what has worked already and we have to change all of this. So for example, a second ago I said, "If someone's a part-time student, they can't do a summer internship." Maybe that means we need to offer something other than summer internships. So let me get that out there. But the person that's been perfect so far has been very, very humanities-ish in terms of their... We want them to have really strong communication skills. So classes that involve a lot of writing and stuff like that. But also what the job is, is it's just helping people. It's phone, email, but there's no quotas to hit. There's no commissions. It's not like a business type of thing really. But people in the B school tend to be a little too focused on hitting numbers.
Rick: What do you mean B school?
Tyler: Business school, sorry.
Rick: Is this subset of the public college that you're talking about?
Tyler: Well at WashU. Anywhere, I mean I think most universities have a business school.
Rick: Are you talking about postgraduate business school, or undergraduate?
Tyler: Undergraduate.
Rick: Okay.
Tyler: So someone majoring in marketing or something like that. They're actually fairly interested in the position. But their goal is not to be a CRM coach long term. There's a type of person who graduates college and then they go to work at some hipster coffee shop because they kind of don't want to be in a corporate environment, they want to stick it to the man a little bit, but they've got the skillset we want. That's, temperamentally, the person we're looking for.
Rick: What's the skill set? Let's focus on that. What's the skill set that you want?
Tyler: It's communication skills, particularly written communication and just enough extroversion, or enough of a gregarious personality that they can connect with people pretty quickly over the phone basically. And then just being overall smart problem solvers. There's not specific skills we're looking for.
Rick: And then meeting your core values?
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: So walk through your values, just so we have those.
Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I mean for a CRM coach specifically, I think the value is fundamentally we want someone who is intrinsically motivated to help somebody. Meaning not extrinsically, not like, "I put a number on the wall, you have to hit it." But you're on the phone with this person, you're going to spend an hour on the phone with them. It is in your nature to do everything for them to get the most possible out of this. That's the main value we're looking for here.
What have you tried
Rick: Okay. What have you done to try to find these people at public schools?
Tyler: Yeah. And I should also say, two of the other schools we're trying to recruit at our Webster and SLU. They're not public, but they're also not like the elite level WashU.
Rick: So SLU is what?
Tyler: SLU is St. Louis University.
Rick: Okay. That's public, isn't it? St. Louis University is private?
Tyler: Yeah, it's a Jesuit school.
Rick: Oh, that's cool. Rick Majerus used to coach there I believe.
Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, they got a good basketball team.
Rick: He was the U of U coach for awhile, back in the day.
Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. .
Rick: Okay. And they have like this gremlin.
Tyler: It's a billiken.
Rick: A billiken. What's a billiken?
Tyler: It's at gremlin. Yeah.
Rick: So what was the other one that you mentioned?
Tyler: Webster. St. Louis actually has a lot of different, pretty good universities, but not top 20.
Rick: So we're saying schools that aren't top tier?
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: Is that what you-
Tyler: Yeah, and especially top tier in terms of privilege, more so than... I don't question anyone's ability at these schools. It's more about the economic background and stuff like that, that makes internships a little less achievable at a lot of these other schools. So you asked what have we done. I mean, the first thing is we went to career fairs and we thought, "Well, we've had success at WashU." At WashU we're paying less than the average place. At UMSL, and Webster, and SLU, we're paying more than the average place. We thought, "This'll be a no brainer, we're going to get tons of applicants." And and no one applied. We're going again, over the next couple of weeks are all the career fairs. It's really, really hard to get anyone to pay attention. We have tried to connect with faculty. I just yesterday met with the dean of arts sci at UMSL.
Rick: Sorry. Arts and science?
Tyler: Arts and sciences. Yeah.
Rick: Okay.
Tyler: Is art sci not a... Anyway, that's what we call it.
Rick: For people like me who did go to college, but didn't really interact with professors and class teachers, classrooms, yeah, we don't have acronyms to describe everything. So arts and science, is that like the humanities department?
Tyler: Yeah, I mean it also includes computer... Arts and sciences at most schools is all the non specialty things. So business would be separate. Engineering would be separate.
Rick: Like the liberal arts idea?
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: Okay. Cool.
Tyler: But so we've tried to connect with the three main factors. One, we try to go to career fairs. Two, we've tried to connect with professors. The reality is professors don't know their students. There are rare gems out there who do, but for the most part they don't know anyone they're teaching.
Rick: So sad.
Tyler: I know.
Rick: I'd love to talk about education one day, but it's just...
Tyler: Yeah, and they're all very friendly and helpful by the way. And we've met a few professors that really have helped out, but for the most part they're like, "This seems great. What you're doing is great."
Rick: "Wish I knew my students better, so I could actually help them and help you. But I don't because I don't really care about them because I'm there for other reasons."
Tyler: That's how the system is set up. And then the third thing is student groups. We have this at WashU, there's one student group in particular, the Women in Computer Science Group, that has been incredible. There's a really well run organization. They let us go and like give talks about here's how GitHub works, here's how to do a code interview, all that kind of stuff. And as a result, we get a ton of applicants from WashU, through that student group. We have tried to reach out to student groups at these other schools. The reality is A, a lot of students aren't very motivated and B, there's this huge trust issue. Where once there is a success story, once someone has gone through it and then like, "I got paid well, I learned a lot. It was a great experience." Then we're in, but how do you get in the first place? That's the question.
Rick: Yeah, so well it sounds like you just need to go more aggressively recruit. What did you do at WashU when you first started? How did you find those people?
Tyler: We just went to the career fair and it blossomed from there.
Rick: But you are a success story from WashU, so you already had that.
Tyler: Yeah, we had the network already.
Creating a success story
Rick: So really, at the end of the day, you need to go find a couple of these at each of the schools and make them really happy.
Tyler: Yeah, by these you mean student groups?
Rick: You need to go find two interns from each school, make them happy and then they will tell their friends. So you shouldn't be targeting seniors.
Tyler: Agreed. I will say the virality hasn't been as, even at WashU, hasn't been as great as we'd hoped. It helps build trust with institutions, the professors, the career center, they trust us more. But since the student body is constantly cycling in and out, we hoped it would just kind of naturally spread. And that hasn't exactly happened. It gets easier each year, but it hasn't really taken a life of its own.
Rick: It sounds like you really need to get to know the students and find out where your ideal people hang out because it's not the career fair. How do you find those people to talk to and basically learn where they're hanging out? I don't know. I didn't go to these colleges, so I can't help you with that.
Tyler: So it's possible that the answer here is this doesn't exist and this is an unsolvable problem. But one of the challenges we've had, even at WashU, is nobody's thinking about... The people majoring in these things are intentionally making the decision not to major in something professionally useful. If you go and major in English, in this day and age, you go $200,000 in debt to major in English. You're effectively saying like, "I choose not to be a part of the system." Right? So none of them are thinking about any career oriented stuff. So where do they hang? We've tried to sponsor the poetry clubs events and things like that. They let us buy them pizza, but we haven't been able to really connect with them or anything in those situations.
Rick: Yeah, I mean have you gotten the right person to talk to you and say no to the intern because of specific objections? Or is this truly getting to the point where you're talking to the people?
Tyler: It's getting to that point.
Rick: You don't know if the internship is the problem yet because you aren't getting people to the point-
Tyler: I don't think it is.
Rick: Okay. I don't think it is either.
Tyler: Everyone who's done it I think has walked away really happy. And we do have these random people. So I mentioned Webster, that's one of the universities here. We had one person that we met through weird unreproducible circumstances. She came and did I. She loved it. She's our advocate now. She goes to Webster and ran a student group and tried... But even she can't get people to pay attention to this.
Rick: Yeah, but I think the reality is it might not be a problem, but the summer internship idea is discriminatory for people who can't afford to quit their day job for three months and take some time off. Because they have to pay for housing. They're people that are truly on their own. And if you want those people, you can't get them through a summer intern.
Tyler: Okay. I totally buy that. So I'm interested in brainstorming what can I do?
Rick: Okay. Yeah. So let's solve the first problem first. I think at the end of the day, if you really want those people, you gotta go walk around campus and talk to a lot of people, until you find the people. So it's just a question of time investment. So there are people out there at these colleges, but I don't know that they're that different from your WashU guys because they're going to be the same people who can take a summer off.
Tyler: I mean, well we're paying well enough now. 3000 a month is enough that they can quit their job, do this and then get another job, potentially.
Rick: Potentially. So you've studied Maslow's hierarchy of needs. People who are worried about basic needs, do not have the luxury of considering what ifs. They're just trying to get through college, so that they can get a better job.
Tyler: Absolutely.
Rick: Yeah. So-
Tyler: And this is why this is so important, right? As if we're not having this conversation, we're not trying to think of ways to get creative here, we're only going to have a certain type of person working at the company.
Rick: I'm willing to say with high confidence, that even if you solve the problem of finding the right person for the job, that they'll solve the they're not WashU people, in terms of that diversity problem. So you'll diversify the college, the conversations, but they're still going to be of privilege because they have the privilege of doing a summer internship program. And people who have the privilege of doing that are privileged.
Tyler: I agree. I do think there's a baby steps thing here, which is, let me ask you this. You know we put a lot of effort into this and mentorship and all that. I understand what you're saying, that someone doesn't think they can take the risk, but if they do, do you think it's actually a good decision for them? Someone who's not coming from privilege? Because if it's not, then it would be immoral of me to even try.
Rick: I don't know enough about this. So what is missing is true stories from people you've talked to, that say, "Hey, I can't do this internship program because I have a job that I've had for four years and it's literally paying for food, tuition, whatever else. Plus I have a kid." There are no stories here, right?
Tyler: Yeah. We haven't heard that story.
Rick: Yeah. But I mean you won't hear that story unless you go talk to people who aren't able to do internships. So I don't know how many people-
Tyler: What would you do to talk, that's all I want to do is talk to people, what would you do to do that?
Rick: I always come back to customer development. Go find these people who-
Tyler: Yeah. That's the stuff I want to dive into. How do you find these people?
How do you find the right people
Rick: Man, start reaching out to people. Are they on LinkedIn? Where are they?
Tyler: Yes. I should have mentioned this. We have tried this with LinkedIn. We reach out to people, just email 50 random people basically. We've had some success with that. Actually you know what I should-
Rick: What's the goal of the email?
Tyler: To get them to talk to us but to get interested in the company.
Rick: Yeah, and I would totally change the objective of reaching out. I think that's that sales and marketing of a position. I think if you go out and you focus on understanding the person, without pitching a product, you might learn some things. It's like, "Hey, I'm doing some market research on how people working through college think about careers and specifically internships. Would you be willing to get on the phone and talk to me about this and answer some questions?"
Tyler: Yeah, that's an interesting. One challenge here, is college students, privileged or not, just do not fucking respond to anything.
Rick: Maybe college is the wrong place to, maybe it's the person who's graduated.
Tyler: That's a good point. So that's another thing. Obviously a summer internship is tough for someone who's not in college, but that would kind of be the dream. There's a different type of lack of diversity if you're only going after college students, right?
Takeaways
Rick: Yeah. Yeah. And so I guess a couple of takeaways from me so far, and I'm not sure we're ready for this. Is one, if you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to get people from different schools eventually to apply for your internship and go through. They're just not going to be as diverse as you want them to be.
Tyler: Can I interrupt you for a second and... Because you said that a few times and I've been meaning to react to that. I agree with you, although I have read as a strategy for recruiting diverse groups of people, that you start with the easy wins and build from there. So WashU doesn't have diversity in the first place, there's nowhere to grow from within WashU. But if you get the privileged students at UMSL, they might know other people.
Rick: That's what I'm saying.
Tyler: It's better than nothing.
Rick: And that's what I'm assuming, is if you keep doing what you're doing, going after the four schools, the three schools other than WashU that you mentioned, you're eventually going to get your anchor.
Tyler: Okay. So you're saying that it's maybe a good strategy?
Rick: I think if you keep doing what you're doing with the career fairs and talking to the deans, eventually you're going to land your first intern. And that's going to lead over time to more diversity in colleges, but not diversity in privilege.
Tyler: Yeah. But then from there-
Rick: Maybe you can get to the people who have diversity in privilege.
Tyler: Yeah, okay.
Rick: Maybe. The other takeaway, is if you really want to go get people who aren't the people who can take internships, you've got to offer something that's not an internship and you've got to probably go look for them post-college. Maybe they didn't even go to college.
Tyler: Right. We're at 45 minutes here. Maybe this should be a totally separate discussion. But I think that that's a very promising idea. I don't know what that thing would be like. What do you offer? It has to take time I think. If the goal is to evaluate if they should work here full-time.
Rick: I think what you offer these people is secondary to knowing who these people are, where they hang out, what problems they have, what's stopping them from looking into a CRM coaching position in the first place. Until you find out where these people are and understand what their constraints are, you can't really offer them anything.
Tyler: Well, I think I know that for... There's a big difference between a college student who could do an internship, versus a full-time person with a job. And we get plenty of applicants not from WashU. Twice this year we've hired CRM coaches full-time, neither of them came from WashU. I don't think we interviewed anyone that was particularly promising from WashU. So we do talk to those people. The reality is at that point life has hit you in the face and you know what a good job looks like. But they all also want full-time jobs, right? They're not going to do an internship or whatever.
Rick: I mean, if you have these people... I see the predicament, you either have to prioritize getting diverse people, or getting the right person for the job. And I think maybe the job itself is discriminatory. I don't know if I've said this before on the podcast, but I read a quote from, what's his name? I think it was George, who wrote Animal Farm? Was it George Orwell?
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. He said something like, "You can tell the quality of someone's thinking by their writing." And really good writing, you don't see that a lot in people who haven't had the privilege.
Tyler: It correlates with the quality of education.
Rick: Yes. And so your job itself might be part of the problem.
Tyler: That has certainly occurred to me. I think there's a lot of truth to that. At the same time that I can't just be like, "Well, okay. Nothing we can do." There are people out there who don't come from privilege, who are still great writers. It's a matter of finding them.
Rick: Yeah. But they may have come from privilege, but they've entered a state of privilege.
Tyler: Yeah. Some have. I do think that the world is littered with kind of artist type people. Like once again, the stereotype being working in a coffee shop, but have all the skills but have decided not to sell out.
Rick: Go to Starbucks and start recruiting Starbucks people. That seems like a great strategy. But I gotta say I use the word privilege and I know it. I've assigned a definition to it based on talking to you, hearing you use the word. So I'm assuming it means basically... I have my own definition of it, but I don't just want to put a disclaimer that I may not be using the word correctly.
Tyler: I mean in context, I certainly get what you're saying. Yeah. The struggle once again, I actually, I think there are a lot of adults, people out of college, or who didn't go to college at all, who are in a good spot. That doesn't go the intern route and we don't have to. So we've actually decided recently, our last few CRM coach hires, we didn't do internships first, for this exact reason. We said, "If we do internships, we're only going to end up hiring WashU students." And thankfully the last four people for this position we've hired aren't WashU students. But in a perfect world it would be you get an intern because you can really evaluate people and make sure they're perfect and then give them the offer.
Rick: Yeah, that'd be an ideal world if everyone was privileged and could take the summer off and do an internship.
Tyler: Yeah. I said at the beginning. Maybe the answer here is there's no solution, but I figured that it was worth.
Rick: Do you think that's the answer is that internship itself...
Tyler: Ah, okay. I think that absolutely what you said is that the job itself is-
Rick: We're doing takeaways right now, right? These are your takeaways.
Tyler: Sure. Yeah. The job itself, I think every job to some extent is discriminatory. I think that the idea of an internship really works specifically with people with a certain type of privilege. But I do think that doesn't mean there are no people who aren't of this specific WashU prototype that couldn't do it. I just think it's much, much harder to find them and that we need to put the effort in to do it. I'm not sure I have a ton of great ideas on what that effort looks like, but I think what you're basically saying... The most promising thing I've heard is try to take advantage of specific types of privilege that exist at other places, but at places where not everybody has that privilege. Start by getting a foot in the door with people who fit our model, that we've already hired and then use that to spread it. The problem is at WashU there's no one to spread to because everyone has privilege. So we need to do this at other schools.
Rick: Yeah, and I think you can say that you're making progress by expanding outside of WashU with the internship that you have. And once you've progressed to that stage, you can decide what to do next. I like it.
Tyler: Okay. Yeah. I still need to figure out how to do that, but that makes this more concrete. That's helpful.
Rick: Cool. Well, I'll wrap up. Anything else you want to say or talk about?
Tyler: I guess just if anyone's listening to this and this sounds hard in a discouraging way. I'll start by saying this, the model that I said works, has worked for us. If you've never hired an intern before, go do that. It works really well. It's great. I don't mean to shit all over it and make it sound depressingly difficult. It's just once things are working, then you have to always look for the next challenge and that's really what we were talking about here. So I don't want you to get discouraged.
Rick: Your challenge is lack of diversity in interns. How do I diversify my interns?
Tyler: Exactly.
Rick: Good. Well, good luck with that. So thank you for listening everyone. You can join the conversation on this topic and review past topics by visiting
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