The Internship: LinkedIn Style
It’s with pride, amazement and excitement that we enter LinkedIn’s fourth internship year. Just over three years ago, we launched our first formal internship program at our Mountain View headquarters. With grassroots efforts and sheer determination, we worked day and night to hire 45 brilliant interns within four months for our engineering and data science teams.
Interns Gone Global
The interns’ arrival infused energy across our company that blew us all away. They arrived bright-eyed - full of enthusiasm, insightful questions, and new ideas that amplified the buzz around everything they were building. They even surprised our CEO with a flash mob. The teams were so impressed by our inaugural class of interns that they signed up for 85 interns the following season in 2011, nearly doubling their request from year one. Then in 2012, we hired 200+ interns with new teams jumping on the bandwagon of university intern talent from sales to marketing to legal. This year, we’ve expanded globally to Europe, India and Singapore.
What We Look for in Interns
To see our internship program grow and expand globally these last few years has been a wild ride, one that I feel incredibly lucky to be a part of. The ability to design the program from scratch with highly invested stakeholders was both nerve-wracking and thrilling. With each internship season, we look for students with a passion for entrepreneurship, who are scrappy problem solvers, and who are ignited by our mission to connect the world’s professionals to help them be more productive and successful. When intern candidates understand at the core what LinkedIn’s impact is on society, that our vision is to create economic opportunity for every professional in the world, we know they care about what the company does, what the company stands for, all of which makes them better at what they do.
Our High Touch Approach
From the start, we knew we would differentiate ourselves in the candidate’s experience, both during the recruiting process and during their tenure with us. We took the time to understand our interns’ interests and aligned them to the appropriate teams. We held a sincere interest in each individual to ensure that their time with us was time well-spent. To our campus recruiting team, our interns aren’t just talented students; they are individuals with unique personalities, endearing idiosyncrasies, and rich life stories. Our emphasis on a very high touch approach and our commitment to open, honest, and transparent interactions with our interns, has built one of the tightest knit intern communities I’ve witnessed.
If you’re interested in being a part of our intern community, we start recruiting for interns in the fall prior to the summer internship season. However, we have year round internship session across all of our global offices. Find out more at studentcareers.linkedin.com. Stay tuned here for stories directly from our interns as they go through their summer internships. And if you can’t wait, check out these blog posts from interns past.