Encouraged by the success of last year's internship program, we decided to reach for more. Last year, we hired four intern developers, who were promoted to junior developers after the internship program had come to an end. They all continue to work with us today! That is why we decided to create a much larger edition this year and invite 15 young, creative, and willing-to-learn people and give them the possibility to grow with us.
Our recruiters, hiring managers, and mentors have been preparing for this project and the onboarding process for several months. While preparing the internship program we focused on quality, speed of the recruitment process, honest feedback, and introducing the candidates to as many team members as possible, including a mentor, team leader, and SpotOn Poland management staff. Our interns joined 7 teams for positions such as Intern Python Developer, Intern Product Designer, Intern Project Manager, Intern iOS Developer, Intern Android Developer, Intern QA Engineer, and Intern Technical Office Assistance.
The interest in internship positions exceeded our expectations. We received hundreds of CVs from ambitious young people. Due to time constraints, we chose several dozen candidates and invited them to the next stages of the recruitment process. Given the fact that it is an internship program, we did not require any commercial experience. We were mainly focused on commitment, creativity, thinking skills, and interests. We knew that the most important and challenging things would happen after recruitment, i.e., the first day of work, onboarding, cooperation with a mentor, and working with international teams.
Therefore, in the first weeks, we focused on group training (communication, organization, projects, and products). We also committed to introducing interns to the world of SpotOn and showing them how we work on a daily basis. At the end of the 3-month internship period, we conducted individual feedback sessions in which the leaders and mentors summed up the feedback from the entire cooperation period and asked for input from the interns. We gathered feedback from our interns and the most appreciated aspects were rapid development, the possibility to ask questions, mutual trust, working on real projects on a daily basis, and trainings.
Several months of preparation and the extraordinary commitment of teams and interns made us prolong our cooperation with everyone and promote most of them to juniors. Moreover, the desire to develop our colleagues meant they received an additional budget for external training. Some of them benefited from it by traveling with the entire team to one of the best European programming conferences, while others decided to choose online training. We are really proud! Congratulations to all our 2022 interns.