STARTUP / INTERN SPECIAL ............................Startups Open Door to Interns, Make the Talent Pipeline Hum

 Startups Open Door to Interns, Make the Talent Pipeline Hum 

The notion of doing summer internship with the crème de la crème is done and dusted. It’s the startups that are now making all the buzz. Interns are not complaining as the stipend on offer can even match up to the best in industry

 
A motley bunch of students – from design schools, IITs, IIMs, master’s degree programmes and even regional colleges – will spend their summers learning the tricks of trade at some of the hottest startups in the country. The likes of TaxiForSure, ZipDial, CommonFloor, Yepme, Simplilearn, Wooqer, Limeroad and LocalBanya, among others, are scrambling to bring talent on board for summer internships and are paying anywhere between . 8,000-80,000 per month.
Take TaxiForSure, for instance. Since the beginning of April, the online taxi aggregator has taken on 25 management interns for a stipend of . 50,000 each. These interns, who are mostly from IIM Bangalore and Lucknow, have been put to work on various critical projects, including designing loyalty programmes, gaining consumer insights to ensure repeat customers and even narrowing down the next markets to enter, and in what order. “The number of internships has swelled five-fold from when we started offering them two years ago,” says Aprameya Radhakrishna, founder and director, TaxiForSure.
Meanwhile, social shopping platform Limeroad, for the first time, is opening up virtual internships, where even those from remote locations can apply. Interns will work on communitybuilding, brand marketing and vendor development projects, collaborating with some of the best talent in the industry. “From Pearl Academy to NIFT from regional MBA and engineering institutes to IITs and IIMs, we are looking at everybody. Since there is an opportunity to do a virtual internship as well, we are open to recruiting even 100 interns if they fit the bill,” says Suchi Mukherjee, co-founder and CEO.
The stipends offered are comparable to those offered by many leading corporates, but what makes students gravitate to them is the chance to work in a hierarchy-free environment, on live projects that directly impact business and gain the kind of experience that will be hard to get in any other industry.
Hardly surprising then that Amit Naik, CTO of e-grocery startup LocalBanya, says they were flooded with resumes, of them at least 30 from MBAs, for summer internships. They finally narrowed it down to three IITians: two from IIT Kharagpur and one from IIT Kanpur. Of them, the marine engineer will be working in operations while the computer engineer will be with the tech team. The integrated masters in economics from IIT-K will be involved in econometrics and predictive modelling. “Next year, we’ll have a good middle-management in place and will take on even more people,” adds Naik
At online shopping company Yepme, which is taking on 10-15 interns in IT, product designing and digital marketing teams for stipends between . 8,000-15,000, the design interns would be researching global fashion trends to strengthen the start-up’s men’s and women’s wear range. Yepme co-founder and COO Sandeep Sharma says they’d be given exposure to actual design of products and good designs will be launched in the market as well.
Bangalore-based startup Wooqer, which will have 8 interns in technology from IIT Roorkee and NIT Jaipur, is going to be mapping their interests/strengths in the first week, after which they are free to pick up from a list of ongoing projects where they’ll work closely with an expert.
IIM-Bangalore’s Pratik Gaonkar, currently interning at Taxi-ForSure, has worked earlier in a corporate structure and has experience of how hierarchy often filters out actions. “Here, I’m getting to interact with the founder, so I know my suggestions are getting heard. Also, it’s a great stepping stone for a future career in entrepreneurship,” he says.
Even for those not looking to take up entrepreneurship in the short term, these internships are a route to bagging full-time jobs after graduation. That’s because for these startups, internship programmes are an investment in creating a long-term pipeline of talent for the company. “The whole idea is talent acquisition,” says LocalBanya’s Naik.
“Now that we have tripled our team size in the last two years, interns are an important part of the hiring process,” says Valerie Rozycki Wagoner, founder and CEO of Zip-Dial, a mobile marketing and analytics platform for emerging markets. The startup has, in the past, recruited two engineers from IIT Kanpur as well as a marketing manager who was earning her Masters in Economics, based on their performance as summer interns. This summer, ZipDial will have 5-7 interns in engineering roles, business development and marketing from ISB and IITs. “We prefer people who have had some work experience. Stipends can range between . 20,000-80,000 per month based on the candidate and the role,” says Wagoner.
Sumit Jain, cofounder and CEO, CommonFloor says the company will be hiring 5 engineering and B-school interns for 8-10 weeks for around . 15,000-30,000 per month. Simplilearn already has 3 interns working on market research and customer satisfaction projects since April. Going forward, it is looking to engage interns in other fields as well.
sreeradha.basu ET140502