Why you should hire high school interns
Everyone says that they want to be more innovative, but most businesses struggle with what actions to actually take and I wanted to provide an extremely simple and yet innovative solution to bring your company to the next level - hire high school students.
In the early days of running a successful startup company, we desperately needed talent and yet simply couldn’t afford to pay seasoned professionals….we could barely afford to pay ourselves anything. I also did not like the idea of college interns, where they are gone by the time you train them and they start adding value.
I was trying to think of solutions to this problem and realized that there was a unique arbitrage opportunity in working with students while they were in high school. The idea was that we could never afford to hire top 0.1% performers in the workforce but we could actually afford to bring them on when they were 15-17 years old.
Now you are probably thinking, "Are you crazy!? Have you ever interacted with 15-17 year olds?"
And yes I have but there is something very unique about these particular students and interacting with them as students like all people follow a Pareto distribution. While the bottom 90% of students are struggling today, test scores are declining and it's difficult to have a conversation, the top 10% of these students are better performers than ever.
Typically, when you hire any intern or employee, you only get a very small snapshot of who they are and if they can perform. From that snapshot, you have to make a hiring decision where many times you are wrong. In the case of the high school students, I reached out to local guidance counselors and STEM teachers and asked them for their top two students in the school and who would be interested in a life-changing internship. The teachers had watched these kids every single day for 2-3 years and were 100% certain who could perform and who couldn't where you never get that kind of clarity in a typical hiring process.
Once we found the students, the next part is where the magic happens. These students bring to your organization several super powers that truly drive innovation:
Zero Regard for Constraints: The thing about high school students is that they have zero professional work experience which most people will view as a negative. And yes, if you ask them to run a meeting, send professional emails or complete some bureaucratic process, they will fail. However, if you give them a project to run on (i.e., fix our video production process, build a new prototype) or just generally ask them to analyze something and provide feedback, you will be absolutely shocked with what they come up with. The reason is that you are bringing someone into your organization that has absolutely zero regard for constraints, process, controls and "how things have always been done." People lose this as they get older where these students bring to the table the perfect recipe for innovation: intelligence with a lack of intellectual limitation and no regard for corporate dogma.
Motivation: There is no one more motivated than a high school student who last week had no money and today is making $20+ per hour doing a professional job (imagine telling your friends at school you are making thousands of dollars a month). They will run through walls for you and this energy is contagious in your organization - you want everyone to catch this!
Relevance and Perspective: It's hard to hear, but as we get older, we become culturally less and less relevant and this is a big problem for every business. High school students provide the absolute best foreshadowing for what is to come in business and culture where leaders need to be aware of this and spend time with young folks especially if they run a B2C company. For example, anyone who spent time with 17 year olds in 2016 would have known to begin shifting their content strategy over to video where most big companies didn’t make this shift until 2020 and some still haven't done this.
This strategy doesn’t work for every business but it is something very inexpensive you can do if you want to add a bit more energy to your organization. Shoot an email out to your local guidance counselors and see what you get back - I am certain you will be shocked by the students who show up.
