Opinions on Interns for the Traditional Search Model
November 22, 2024
by a searcher from Duke University - The Fuqua School of Business in Atlanta, GA, USA
I am launching a traditional search within the next few months, and I am deciding on whether I want to implement unpaid interns. For those of you who have had unpaid interns, I would love to hear your opinions on how useful they are as the pros of having interns vs. the administrative burden that may come with having them. I have talked to many searchers, and so far, the opinions are split. I would love to hear about your experience searching with or without interns and if you would change your decisions to use or not use them if you were to run another search process.
from University of Pennsylvania in Reston, VA, USA
Then I got involved with an entrepreneurial financial services firm that has also done 4 acquisitions. They're kind of a scrappy blend of merchant bank and independent sponsor. They have an intern program with 6 interns (for 6 principals). The founder's philosophy is that anything tedious and administrative should be offloaded to them so we can focus on thinking work. The model works well and saves us all time.
For my own independent sponsor shop, I'm planning to hire 2 unpaid interns to focus on the administrative. I'm targeting undergraduate juniors so they're young enough to be willing to do the tedious stuff, and also have a couple years of school left to extend their involvement. I'm being upfront with them that this is an opportunity to learn how the PE field works and to gain relevant experience, but the price of admission is getting the mundane stuff done. I'm also quick to describe that this work—while monotonous—is nothing that I haven't done myself for years. So to learn the field you have to roll up your sleeves and get to work (we don't all get to start out as Gordon Gecko).
Posted my position description at Handshake (https://app.joinhandshake.com/) for just 4 specific schools (one of which is Fuqua) without promoting the listing or inviting anyone to apply. From those 4 schools I've had 686 views and 22 applicants, all of which could do the job.
Hope that's useful. Good luck!
from The University of Chicago in Chicago, IL, USA
always thought managing people in a nonpaid environment is true leadership!
I've used unpaid interns for all my ventures. One of my ventures grew to $31M ARR. For search I scaled to 39 interns and build an intern management software. We closed in 11.5 months had our first LOI in 6 weeks and by many search fund investors was called the "first tech-enabled search" and the "greatest searcher ever"
I continued to run the program even after acquistion for leadgen and one of our interns got us a $500K RFQ from Europe and another one close a $10K deal just 3 weeks after he joined. Interns are amazing. You can get incredible talent for free. The key is to find talent before written on its resume (We have a 40 page handbook just on this philosophy)
Fast forward to today, I launched Search as a Service and run a team of 40 interns. We are supporting 9 searchers (Trad, Self, Family office, etc) right now and we only launched a few weeks ago.
DM me and I can share key insights