Hire Things – things for hire!

Last year, John Clegg (ProjectX, ZoomIn) & I pulled together the first New Zealand “Summer of Code”. With the help of grant funding from FRST, we put about 14 smart IT students from Victoria University into summer internship positions with 7 smart Wellington startup companies (Spikefin, Silverstripe, PlanHQ.com, ProjectX/ZoomIn, BrowserCRM, Chaos Dimention, and Hire Things). 

Well, we’re back again for more this year with Summer of Code 2.0!  And this time it’s grown up a tad!  Yesterday, along with the help of database guru Paul Gold, and Thong Kuah from ProjectX, we brought together about 20 companies and 50 students for about 200 quick-fire 10-15 minute interviews in one day!   Most of last year’s companies were there, plus a whole lot more of cool up and coming Wellington IT companies, and some of the more well known successes such as Trade Me, Weta Digital, and Xero.com (the great online accounting service that we use).

 
Here’s just a few of the budding IT whizzes waiting at Creative HQ for their next interview.

We will now help those companies that wish to apply for some grant funding to get that sorted, and will help out throughout the programme with seminars and workshops for the students.

Why do we do it?  We’ll, as a start-up business, it’s a win-win situtation where we can get smart students working for us with the help of FRST grant funding, and it’s a good feeling to help the next generation of IT whizzes get some real world experience. 

 
Here’s Peter having a look through the CV and interview notes from our 14 interviews we did yesterday!

We are hoping, like last year, to take on 2 smart students to help us drive HireThings.com forward into new territories. 

It also helps us keep in touch with the other great companies here in Silicon Welly, and help other start-ups like us to get ahead.

You can read more about it and see some photos of the full-on day of interviews here.