What it's Like to Hire Interns for IBM

[Andy Nguyen]

And you think getting an internship at a top bank is difficult?

Try to see what these students had to do to get an internship at IBM.

The article is very interesting in getting into the mind of people who are doing the interviewing, hiring.

Things Ive learned from hiring interns for IBM

 

[Connor]

That would definitely fit in the difficult internships to get bucket in my mind. The article does a good job of demonstrating how important it is to go above and beyond your university coursework to stand-out and gain an edge.

 

[Yike Lu]

The approach they take definitely makes sense.

 

[DominiConnor]

It's interesting that banks usually don't do the same, they chat to candidates, some like GS chat with them a lot.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

There are few jewels in there

• Most students didn’t know much about programming in the real world. In particular, they didn’t seem to be very up-to-date, most having never heard of things like SVN, GIT, MVC, ORM, Agile programming, or NoSQL.
• In general, the qualifications listed on the resumes we saw were greatly exaggerated by mediocre candidates, and somewhat downplayed by the great ones. (It looked like some form of Dunning–Kruger effect was at work.)
• Some candidates, taking advantage of the long distance telephone interview, tried to Google their answers and I could literally hear them typing as I presented them with questions that they weren’t familiar with. Replies such as, “Hmmm…well…”, followed by a 20 second pause and then the all but cut and paste Wikipedia definition. This was very easy to spot and didn’t end up boding well for those candidates who opted for this less than honest route.

 

[TraderJoe]

I wonder why they put in so much time and effort into recruiting a couple of interns. I have seen GS make 40 full-time offers to the BBA students at UT-Austin in one day. They rely on GPA more than anything else. The MBA recruitment takes more time, but then the stakes are a lot higher in MBA recruitment.

 

[abcdefh]

speechless .. ibm ... article ...

 

[marina]

I wonder why they put in so much time and effort into recruiting a couple of interns. I have seen GS make 40 full-time offers to the BBA students at UT-Austin in one day. They rely on GPA more than anything else. The MBA recruitment takes more time, but then the stakes are a lot higher in MBA recruitment.

this is for a particular group within IBM (DB2 development). obviously they have to show some results at the end of in internship. the BBA guys GS hired may be doing some clerical jobs.