500 Interns - 30 Internships at 30 Hot Startups: No Cover Letters Allowed

I agree that communication skills are a great skill to have as a programmer. I'd probably even rank it higher than raw programming ability, personally. (BTW, not all of these startups are only looking to hire developers--a student looking for a marketing internship would probably do very well posting a video.)

I don't think, though, that a cover letter is a great test of these skills. Cover letter templates are abundant and it's very easy for someone to basically copy and paste one in their application. Our team has read every cover letter sent through our site and we noticed some interesting patterns with them. Initially, most students didn't really know what to put in a cover letter and they basically looked like form letters. We created a few resources to educate students on what to write and placed links to them in the application flow. This helped immensely (a lot more than I expected, honestly) and the quality improved.

Still, though, as an employer looking at the resumés and cover letters of students, it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between candidates before doing a phone screen. They have limited experience and skills to highlight. We're trying the blog post / think-of-something-creative application process basically as an experiment to see what students come up with. It's possible that by removing the constraints that students normally perceive on cover letters that something interesting will shake out. You may think it a waste of your time, but you also aren't on the list of companies looking at these candidates :-) Companies participating can opt-in with this expectation in mind.

I actually thought the same thing about the internship cycle last year. At the school I went to, almost every engineer I knew had accepted an internship by December and many had by October. I was actually really surprised to see that many great students from schools that don't have a heavy GOOG/MSFT/AMZN, etc. recruiting presence were looking for internships up through the end of April. Also, we saw a lot of sophomores applying around this time as well.

Startups tend to be less picky about year of graduation and more interested in the capabilities of the student. The best intern I've had was a sophomore who within a month was contributing like a regular member of the team. We had him stay on part-time through the next school year.

I'm pretty confident we'll find good students again this year even in April. If this experiment goes well, we'll probably try another push in the fall to help startups edge in on big company recruiting territory.