This internship is about seeking out talent, studying, and learning while also sharing your experience and knowledge with others.
We organized our internship program to tutor a new generation of software developers and find talented individuals to work together.
Why we run an internship in Sloboda
We’ve been conducting an internship program within Sloboda Studio for several years. This internship brings us a lot of fun and inspiration. But there are two main reasons for us to keep it going.
- Sloboda Studio actively participates in the development of the programming community. In addition to the internship, we organize such tech events as Ruby on Rails meetups, hackathon weekends, and the biggest outsource industry conference in East Europe. We believe that young developers are the future and that this future is worth investment.
- With over 10 years of experience on the market, we’ve been looking for new approaches to finding the best talents and we found out that growing talents yourself thorough internships is one of the best ways to do that.
As a whole, our interns are getting the opportunity to study, practice, and start a career, and Sloboda Studio gets to add new talent to their team.
How We Select Interns
We received 120 applications for the latest internship we had.
A few weeks of careful selection left us with four interns who studied with us for the following weeks.
Sloboda Studio Internship experience summary:
- 10 weeks of intern advertising and selection
- Choosing 4-6 interns among 120 applicants
- 8 weeks of internship
- 1 fully produced product
- 6 mentors
The Selection is Comprises 4 Stages
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Technical Test
Technical testing consists of two parts: skills tests and three practical tasks. We chose to use the tasks from the Programming Olympics: these tasks are complex enough to show the candidate’s knowledge level, mindset, and the way they tend to solve tasks.
Already at this stage, it is significant for us to involve future mentors in the selection of future interns.
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English Test
Good English is absolutely essential. Our English test focuses mostly on grammar and speaking, as we want to make sure that our potential colleagues will be able to communicate fluently with our clients.
We pay particular attention to the speaking skills of candidates when we interview about previous experiences, projects, technical skills, and career plans.
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HR Interview
When choosing our future colleagues, checking a candidate’s soft skills is crucial. The key qualities we aim to see in our potential interns are responsibility, maturity, teamwork skills, friendliness, and high learning ability.
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The Final interview
This stage helps us to take a final decision in regard to our further investments of time, effort and resources.
Such careful selection allows us to find people who fit our team well. On average, three out of four interns successfully finish the internship program and stay on at the Sloboda Studio as junior developers.
The internship Process
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Induction course: 2 weeks
Our interns meet our team and their mentors. They get acquainted with the core technologies they are going to study further. Typically our internships focus on Ruby and Ruby on Rails development.
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Internship: 8 weeks
During the internship, our interns are working eight hours a day – with the option of four in the office and four hours remotely.
We tried out several approaches within our internship programs and came up with the best solution for what our interns have to work on. All our interns take part in the creation of real products – the products for our internal usage.
From time to time we held product demos and thus our latest internship resulted in the release of the internal application for Sloboda’s HR and recruitment needs.
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Presentation of the internship results
The final step of our internship is a presentation. It is an exam that comprises of an interview with one of our senior developers to check the interns’ technical and soft skills combined with a demonstration of the developed product.
Sloboda Studio Internship Results
Our interns:
- Start learning new technologies
- Help create a real product – our internal application
- Get a job in Sloboda Studio as a Junior Developers
Our recent internship program graduation.
Sloboda Studio:
- Contributes to the software development community
- Helps our mentors develop their tutor skills
- Enriches the team with young talents
Sloboda Studio is an ever-growing company and we are constantly looking for new talents in various fields and technologies.
Don’t hesitate to contact us for any details you could be interested in.
