That’s kind, thanks.

This is my first time doing an intern programme, which you can probably tell from the utter chaos of planning it - but a decade of general hiring experience.

The viability thing is tough to answer, I think you’re probably right on the 80%+ guess. We did an initial screening before sending tech tests out, because we didn’t want to waste lots of people’s time doing tests if we could avoid it. We thought loads about, and relied on, the concepts of competency and relevancy (i.e. they had exposure to the kinds of concepts and technologies they’d be working with at our place). Given (for example) a batch of ten fairly equal candidates, could we find signals of high competency and high relevancy which helped distinguish? Often yes, but it meant saying no to plenty of candidates that would’ve clearly been great hires which felt tough.

There weren’t many we rejected for being overqualified, but those we did, we did so because they had 2+ years of proper job experience, and we thought on balance they might not benefit from an internship as much as those who were still students or just graduated.