Internshala is an internship platform, based out of Gurgaon, India. Founded by Sarvesh Agrawal, an IIT Madras alumnus, in 2010, the website helps students find internships with organisations in India.n It started out as a WordPress blog that aggregated internships across India and articles on education, technology and skill gap. Internshala launched its online trainings in 2014. As of 2017, the platform had 1.5 million students and 40,000 companies.
Can you tell us more about Internshala and its current positioning in the international job board market?
Internshala is an exclusive platform focusing only on internships. 80,000 organisations and 3Mn+ candidates (mostly college students and recent graduates) use the platform to find each other for internships. Our focus market is India (with 95%+ of our users) though we do have a small % of international users as well.
Our internship platform is full automated, equipped with advanced features including in-product communication and recommendation system, and free both for companies and candidates. Internshala is ideal for any organisation looking to hire interns from or with-in India or for anyone looking for internship opportunities in India.
To help candidates learn the skills needed in the industry, we also offer nominally priced (~$20 per training program) online trainings for students in 15 different domains such as web development, digital marketing, communication skills etc. These trainings are offered through our state of the art e-learning platform https://trainings.internshala.com
Today, we are world’s largest internship and online training platform in terms of users (Source: Alexa) and a 80 member team based out of Gurgaon, India. The interesting fact about our team is that most of us started our careers at Internshala as interns and even today 15% of our workforce comprises of interns. So we are truly of the interns, for the interns, and by the interns! :)
What are the specific features that make your job board different from your competitors?
Other than the fact that we are solely focussed on internship, there are 3 specific reasons why we stand out from competitors:
- Our internship platform is free for students and companies (while others provide freemium for both or charge one side) and
- We publish only with-stipend internships on the platform (except NGOs) and verify every company before listing – this has helped us win the trust of both the students and companies and build a quality business.
- Our online trainings offer flexibility of learning anytime anywhere to our users that traditional classroom training programs lack. And compared to other e-learning platforms, our trainings are designed to teach an industry-relevant skill than a subject, are extremely affordable (costing ~ $20 per learner for a 6 weeks program), highly engaging, and come with daily mentor support. All of this put together provides the best-in-class learning experience to our users.
What can you say about the current traffic on your website? What countries are visiting more often?
With ~3 Mn users visiting the website every month, Internshala is world’s largest internship and training platform (Source: Alexa Rank). Our closest international competitor is Internships.com (Source: Alexa Rank).
95% of our traffic and users are from India as it is our focussed market though now international employers (~100 every month) are also using Internshala to hire interns from India to add diversity and bring in fresh talent into their teams. Among the international audience, most of the users come from the USA, UAE, UK, and Germany among others.
How do you plan to develop your job board within the next few years? Any new projects?
In general, the world will be a happier place if everyone was doing what they loved and could build a successful career in that. Far too often we end up living lives that could have been so much more fulfilling and satisfying than the one we choose (rarely by choice and mostly by chance). Especially in India, we rarely figure out what our passion is and even more difficult is to get relevant exposure and build skills in that domain.
In the next 10 years, Internshala should have solved this problem for each of the 30 million college students in India to begin with, where we put them on a career path that can truly do justice to their potential and help them live what they love. Along the way we would also look to expand to other countries where our product and service could make a meaningful difference to the society.
What are the main challenges you will be facing in the coming years?
We have always focused on measuring our success on – the number of applicant who actually get an internship through Internshala. In the last financial year, this number was 100,000+.
The key challenge to achieving that goal (and Internshala’s mission of a meaningful internship on every resume) would be to upskill the students. Far too many students lack the necessary technical and soft skills to get an internship and get rejected when they apply. To bridge this gap is essential and central to Internshala’s existence and with our online training platform and advent of social media and technology in general, we are on our way to solving this challenge.
What do you think about Jobboard Finder and why is it an advantage for you to be registered on our website?
In one sentence, Jobboard Finder is a Wikipedia of recruitment platforms. With evolving e-recruitment strategies, the platform makes it easier for recruiters to connect with relevant recruitment platforms. Helping recruiters across the world connect with interns is one of the core objectives of Internshala and Jobboard Finder opens the door for us to reach an international audience.
We hope you have found this article Interesting! Please let us know if you’d like us to cover any specific topics in the Jobboard Finder blog
Author: Armelle
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