GitLab is establishing an on-going internship program that can offer students, graduates, career switchers, and those returning to the workforce an opportunity to further their careers. We desire to create an inclusive program that will provide a fair and equal opportunity for all qualifying candidates.
We do not yet have a tried and tested program and are undertaking a limited pilot in 2020. This pilot will be used to validate and refine our approach to offering internships at an all-remote company. For this reason, the structure and scope of this program will likely change in the future.
| Role | Person |
|---|---|
| Executive Sponsor | Eric Johnson (VPE) |
| Program Lead (DRI) | Roos Takken |
| Recruiting Lead | Liam McNally |
| Program Coordinator | Jean du Plessis |
| Program Coordinator | Nick Nguyen |
The following criteria are considered required for candidates to be eligible for the internship program:
Please refer to the Software Engineering Intern job family for further details.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2019-11-12 | Applications for hosting an intern opens |
| 2019-11-13 | Applications for applying for internship opens |
| 2019-11-29 | Applications for hosting an intern closes |
| 2019-12-09 | Successful team applications announced |
A priority for the pilot program is attracting promising university students who are nearing graduation. Therefore, we are choosing dates that align with university academic calendars.
The pilot program will be 16 weeks starting 2020-05-11 until 2020-08-28.
The internship program will primarily be remote, with two weeks of co-location working.
Internships at GitLab offered in the framework described in this page will be paid and follow the same logic as that depicted in our Compensation Calculator and according to our Global Compensation Principles. This means that, as usual, the San Francisco benchmark, location and experience factors will be taken into account during the recruitment process and before making an offer. Depending on country regulations, we will have to align with national labor laws.
For the pilot, we will primarily target our advertising and promotion of the program at university students. However, we are not limiting candidate intake to university students and are open to all qualifying candidates. We exclusively focus all our active sourcing activities on candidates from underrepresented groups.
We advertise on all the traditional recruiting platforms as well as the GitLab vacancies page. Additional advertising is done on internship focussed job boards (e.g. Youtern, angel.co etc.)
We proactively reach out to and engage with universities/colleges to hold a Virtual Careers Talk to encourage students at those universities to apply. Also, we reach out to any associations within these universities that represent underrepresented groups and hold Virtual Careers Talk with them.
We hold virtual talks at a minimum of five universities in the following regions: North America, Europe, APAC, MENA.
We are setting the bar high at the application stage and introducing an automated online assessment to help with screening candidates. These steps will allow us to work with a manageable number of candidates during the face-to-face interview stages.
* Candidates must score a strong yes to move on to the panel interview stage.
Note 2020-09-01: Currently, we do not have an active Internship program. We are therefore not accepting any applications for the program today. GitLab teams are able to apply for an intern to join their team.
Applications get evaluated on the following criteria:
The team manager and mentors will also need to be able to actively participate in the interview process.
The Program Lead, Program coordinators, and VP of Engineering will evaluate the applications, and successful teams will be announced on 2019-12-09. With the selection of hosting teams attributes of diversity (teams, locations, roles/function) will be taken into account. If it comes to a tie-break the VP of Engineering will be the DRI for the selection.
For future iterations of the internship we want to plan to bring interns onboard and save budget for their offers before the program starts. This should be planned in collaboration with the Leadership of the group and Finance Business Partner.
For the pilot program the hosting teams will determine whether they would want to offer a fulltime role to the interns during the program. This is done based on two criteria:
Note: If there's no budget/headcount availability in the team of the internship, the intern can research other opportunities in the organisation. An overview of the open internal roles can be viewed in Greenhouse. If the role of interest is in a different team or job family, we would ask the intern to go through (a part of) the recruitment process again. This can include several steps of the hiring process such as Technical interview, Behavioral interview and Further interviews
After the internship the aim would be to hire the intern as an Intermediate Engineer (depending on previous experience). The timeline for hiring decisions would be as follows:
If an offer is not made or an offer is not accepted, there are opportunities to stay in touch with GitLab's team or People Business Partner and re-enter a conversation at a later time.
Upon the completion of the pilot, participating teams will be asked to complete
a retrospective. This will follow the process used for GitLab's monthly
team
retrospectives.
Engineering managers should create an issue in the
gitlab-com/engineering-internships
project using the Retrospective template and customize it for their team. This
issue will initially be confidential.
During the retrospective all team members should be encouraged to contribute, even if they didn't work directly with the intern, so that a complete picture of the effect on the team can be built.
Following the retrospective period the issues will be made public.
The feedback survey provides interns with the opportunity to freely express views about working at GitLab. The People Experience team will send the Feedback Survey to all interns 2 days prior to the pilot programme completion. The People Business Partner & the intern may proactively set up time to discuss their responses and ask for further information. The feedback survey are not mandatory, however your input will help provide GitLab with information regarding what worked well and what can be improved in future iterations.
