ClickTime is a small 20 person, privately-held company that works on SaaS time and expense tracking. It’s not a startup, there are no high profile investors, and revenue growth, while consistent, is certainly not explosive. Intern salaries are significantly below what Facebook, Google, and other elite giants pay. There’s no fancy swag, no relo, no housing, no free food.

And yet, ClickTime’s internship program has consistently been able to land amazing students. A significant portion stayed on for multiple summers and converted to full-time. Others went on to work at Google, Microsoft, and Apple. One student even went on to cofound a YC company.

So, how did ClickTime do it?

First, let’s talk a bit about what interns care about. In no particular order, the list looks something like:

1. Street cred/social proof/working at a company that looks nice and fancy on your resume
2. Money/help with logistics (relo, housing)/perks
3. Impact
4. Getting to work on cool stuff/getting code into production
5. Good mentorship and learning new things

I worked at ClickTime for over 4 years as an engineer and was very heavily involved in intern hiring and recruiting, so I hope I can share some insights into how we addressed these things.

In our case, we couldn’t do much with the first two items[1][2]. Instead, we focused on the rest of the stuff and became really, really awesome at it. Even if we couldn’t leverage a huge brand or pay people top dollar/stuff interns’ faces with free food, we could give them a great work culture, meaningful projects, and a sense of having walked out a better engineer. And that’s what people remember.

Here’s what we did.

Engineers bought in to how cool it was to have interns.

This buy-in probably mattered more than any other single factor. Before you do anything else, make sure that you have buy-in from engineering, or your program will be dead in the water. And I’m not talking about perfunctory buy-in where people pay lip service to how cool having interns would be. I’m talking about at least one influential engineer being really, really fucking hyped about the internship program. Why does this matter so much? The thing is, you can sell the level of impact interns have til you’re blue in the face, but until someone actually comes up with what projects they’re going to work on, who they’re going to be working alongside, and how much access they’ll have to higher-ups, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, you really need an engineer to be like, “Oh hey, here are some hack day projects we started working on but didn’t have time to finish. Perhaps an intern could work on some of these.” You need people who are excited about the program to be the ones out recruiting and doing internship interviews. Because their excitement is going to be contagious. Few things are more compelling than organic enthusiasm. The worst case scenario is managing to get top talent and then making them fix a bunch of obscure, all-over-the-place, low-priority bugs that won’t see the light of day until 5 releases from now.

The internship program itself was really well-designed.

Every summer, we’d bring in a marketing intern, a product management intern, and up to 3 engineering interns.  Over the course of the summer, all the interns would work on an intern project together, effectively forming a mini-company within ClickTime proper. After familiarizing themselves with the product, they’d find ways to make it better or think up brand new features that it was missing.  We’d also pitch some ideas to them, and ultimately, they’d pick something they were the most excited to build. The marketing intern would work on ways to engage users (and how to measure user engagement), ways to publicize the feature, and so on. The PM intern would come up with a spec. The engineering intern(s) would build it. By the end of the summer, the students invariably had a fully functional prototype, and many intern projects have ended up in production with only minor tweaks/additions (stuff like scalability, hooking the feature into the rest of the application, etc).  Past examples of intern projects included a way to photograph and upload expense receipts, a mobile app for expense tracking, an incentive module for employees to submit their time, and a way to easily export time and expense data in QuickBooks.

In addition to working on the intern project, engineering interns would be a bona fide addition to the ClickTime development team. They’d get tickets to work on, and their time and contributions would be budgeted into release planning. Historically, in addition to working on tickets and the intern project, our engineering interns would find some part of ClickTime they thought could be better and improve it. We did our best to foster an environment that was receptive to new ideas, and we’d support the interns in building stuff they thought up. Because we tended to hire very smart and driven students, at the end of summer, we’d be left with amazing work that we never tasked them with or saw coming.

Interns had dedicated mentors.

During the summer, interns would regularly meet with the dev lead (PM and marketing interns would meet with analogous leads) and with the CEO, who would regularly provide product-level feedback on iterations of the intern project. In addition, interns had an engineer who was their dedicated mentor. Sometimes being a mentor meant doing code reviews. Sometimes it meant acting as a sounding board. Sometimes it meant answering questions. And sometimes it meant just checking in and saying hey. One of the biggest complaints I heard during internship interviews when I asked students what they didn’t like about their past experiences was feeling like they got left alone all summer. Some students are super proactive, but many are shy and are afraid of looking stupid by asking a lot of questions. You want a go-to person whose job, in the eyes of the intern, is to work with them. To ensure that the mentorship aspect runs smoothly, a trick you can do is to assign more work to a mentoring engineer than he could complete on his own — this kind of thing encourages organic delegation and create a real dependence on the intern. Outside of the direct benefit to the intern, having engineers taking on interns is a good way for more junior people to get a taste of what it’s like to have minions (or, more politically correctly, start learning how to manage and delegate).

The CEO was out recruiting interns.

ClickTime’s CEO is a Cal alum, and he’d attend Cal engineering career fairs and stand there for hours to talk with students. I remember when I went to my first career fair with ClickTime, and I made a point to eavesdrop on the conversations he was having to see if I could pick up some pointers. It was actually quite remarkable. Alex made every student he spoke with feel like the most interesting man (or woman) in the world. At career fairs, when you have students lining up outside your booth, you start to feel the pressure to get through them quickly and keep the line moving, but Alex took what seemed like a long time to find out exactly what each student was interested in. Sometimes, students didn’t have an answer ready, and he would then either tease it out of them, or failing that, give them advice about how to figure out what they wanted to do. It was really quite amazing. Students would regularly walk away with different body language than they had approached the booth; many of them looked a few inches taller.

Everyone selling the program was able to talk about it in depth.

When recruiting, everyone representing the company could give specific project examples, describe to students exactly how their summer would look, and share anecdotes about previous summers.

We were open to hiring underclassmen, if they were remarkable.

This is especially handy if you don’t have a huge brand to leverage. Sure, the conversion rate drops off a bit if you hire underclassmen instead of juniors, but if they have a great summer, they’ll likely come back, and at the very least, they’ll tell their friends. A huge reason why ClickTime’s internship program was able to land top talent was because of the reputation it established on the Cal campus over the years.

[1] Having a great engineering brand is probably the most important thing you can do to attract top talent (both interns & f/t people), but that doesn’t happen overnight and is out of the scope of this question.

[2] With respect to money and perks, we decided that because we couldn’t afford to pay for housing or relo, we would focus primarily on local candidates. If you do have some means, though, I’d say that personalized, thoughtful gestures matter a lot more than sweeping perks. If you’re not close to public transportation, you can buy your interns bikes. Or if you don’t have the means to secure intern housing, you can have someone in the company take on and own the task of helping your interns find summer sublets.

Note: This post was adapted from an answer I wrote on Quora.