AV4 | ‘Self-Serve’ HR And Building A Remote-First Organisation | Jason Kan, Virtual Internships

Getting your team to embrace the culture you want to build is challenging especially when they are remote and distributed across the world. How do you create structures and processes without making it heavy and bureaucratic?

Discussion Topics: ‘Self-Serve’ HR and Building a Remote-First Organisation

• How Jason joined Virtual Internships
• Forming the early team
• Being intentional about culture
• Getting newcomers to embrace the company culture
• Leveraging and developing junior hires to maximise their contribution
• Delegating work the right way
• Setting up a distributed team for success
• Socialising new hires in a remote-first environment
• Making HR a ‘self-serve’ process before building out the People function
• Hiring the right people for the stage of business
• Building transparency through the ‘VIP guide’ for job-seekers
• Finding the right hires by understanding their MITs

Transcript: ‘Self-Serve’ HR and Building a Remote-First Organisation

Hau Ly: Hi everyone, we’re your hosts Adrian and Hau, and welcome back to AVV Founders and Friends Podcast Season one. We’re sitting down with successful founders in Vietnam and Southeast Asia to get a behind the scenes look on their first hires and early teams of their companies.

Adrian Latortue: And today, we are here with a special guest, Jason Kan, CEO of Virtual Internships, a platform that empowers global career success through guaranteed remote internships with companies around the world. Jason is based in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, which is also the main office for Virtual Internships. Jason, can you share with us a little bit more about Virtual Internships?

Jason Kan: Sure, and Hau and Adrian, thanks for having me on the podcast, where Virtual Internships were an Ed-Tech scale up that works with students and graduates around the world, and enables them to launch their career within 30 days, via a guaranteed remote placement with organisations around the world in 25 plus countries, we’re trying to fundamentally make young people more employable. So we’re all driven by that mission. And you know, how we get there, of course, is kind of my task, I suppose, as COO, I’m the executor. I’m the one trying to take that vision set by Dan and the leadership team and making it happen. So that’s a little primer in terms of who we are, and maybe what I do.

Hau Ly: Jason, I believe you are the first COO that we have on the podcast. And I’m really curious about your journey to joining Virtual Internships. Can you share a little bit about that with us and our audience?

Jason Kan: Sure. Hau, we are a relatively rare breed that’s COO and even rarer, I say that, you know, would appear on a podcast because we tend to be generally quieter. In terms of my journey Hau, I suppose the most relevant starting point is prior to Virtual Internships, I was working for an organisation called CRCC. Asia, which is an education management organisation that helps working with universities and taking their students and graduates to do in-person internships, primarily initially in China. And so as we scaled, you know, there was a need for someone to kind of build the processes, hire the people and set the sales process. And so from that journey, I was elevated to being COO for CRCC, Asia, all around in four years, I suppose. And then come early 2020 that was where Dan, our CEO of CRCC, Asia went over to VI to become CEO of VI. And then I was the first person alongside Dan to really take VI, from where it was in 2020, to where it is now.

Adrian Latortue: What did you see in Virtual Internships that made you want to say, Hey, I want to jump into this team that already exists and take over the operations, and grow it? What made you decide to join as an early team member?

Jason Kan: Yeah, so I see this from two perspectives, A from the business perspective, and B from my own development perspective. So from the business perspective, it was all about timing. Virtual Internships was set up pre-pandemic in 2018. Now that version of VI worked with a couple of universities had, you know, a handful of host companies that have a few 100 students on the platform. But there wasn’t that kind of real acceleration in the business. And that came off course in early 2020, with a pandemic. So timing wise, it was almost perfect for business, like Virtual Internships to be in existence. And then in terms of the development side of things, Adrian when Daniel, and I took over VI in early 2020, which looks like organisation said, look, there’s some foundational infrastructure things that needed to be iterated on, or like built almost immediately, organisational design culture, that we’re here to the business that had two or three Junior High’s at that stage. And that’s where really my skill set came in like, I tend to think of myself and I think most COOs would think of themselves as specialist generalists. Now, I wore the title of COO, but really in reality, I was HR, I was an acquisition, I was kind of product I was, you know, some of marketing. So that it was almost like a perfect storm of factors that meant timing was right for VI to take off. And also the timing was right for someone like myself to work alongside Dan to kind of build that business as quickly as possible.

Adrian Latortue: Building everything from the ground up, you know, you’re filling all of these roles, right? A lot of the operational roles, you’re building infrastructure, thinking about culture. And as an early team member, you mentioned already three people during your team members that you had hired, what roles were they filling, and then kind of coming into the team who are the first three people that you hired?

Jason Kan: Yeah, two of them were more customer service. And then the third person, they were more of an operations type individual who actually had a very corporate background. And so they were filling in gaps, per se. The first couple of hires that Dan, and I made after that, well, from our previous organisation at CRCC, Asia, we had two people that we immediately brought over from the leadership side of things. So that was a head of finance, and head of B2B sales. We know, revenue is the lifeblood for any organisation, we have this superstar head of sales as CRCC. Let’s bring her over to VI. And on the finance side of things, you know, we have this amazing head of finance, who’s more than finance, you know, she’s legal, she’s compliance, and so they were our first two people that we brought over. And then, you know, from there, we started to bring in other folks from the CRCC Asia business, which amounted to around 20 folks, in total, so the vast majority of these we’ve been working with for the best part of 3 4 5 years. So, we knew their skill sets, we knew their ability to execute. So that’s how we started them, you know, to build the organisation from that point onwards.

Adrian Latortue: So it sounds like you had a lot of people come over from CRCC, Asia. You know, I’m assuming that’s how you met them. But how did you convince them to join VI? And then what do you think made each of these people great hires?

Jason Kan: Yeah, great question. With typical pathway, I suppose for building a business is, they often say, it’s built by generalists scaled by specialists. And so a lot of these folks that we had in the other business were super adaptable. And we may not initially say, Hey, this is the definitive role that you’re going to be serving, because the whole point of we need to figure this out together. So it was always a case of look, that we’ve got this rocket ship. And we want you to come over, and in the first 6, 12 months, we’re going to figure out what’s going to be the right seat for you. And funnily enough, you know, we had one person come over, and I think they were working on customer service, and then moved over to operations, and then moved over to help him with the products. And then eventually, we landed on them working on what we call automation and tech, and it took three different roles for us to finally get that person into the right fit. And it takes a certain type of individual, you know, that is willing to go through that kind of cycle. And so the majority of the people that we brought up, and we knew they had that in them.

Adrian Latortue: Changing 4 to 5 roles in 6 to 12 months, it might sound like a nightmare for some companies. But if it’s the path that pays way for truth fit, then it sounds like it’s working. A question that I have is, if so many people came over from CRCC Asia, I would think that a lot of the culture and the values that Virtual Internships are defined by this previous organisation, right? Is that true at Virtual Internships? And if it’s not, then can you describe a little bit about how you intentionally shaped the culture and values at Virtual Internships to be different from the previous organisation?

Jason Kan: I love this question Adrian like I’m culture free. And like I’ve always prescribed to the view that you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So, yes, the culture we have at CRCC Asia was institutionalised for the vast majority is 15 20 folks, and CRCC Asia is not a VC backed early stage startup where it’s all about growth, growth, growth. And so actually, the contrarian in Dan and I were like, this isn’t necessarily the culture that we need at VI because it’s a different type of business. And so it was actually a real challenge to codify a different type of culture in VI and B, get those folks on board with the idea that this is a completely different business in terms of how we want to run and operate it. For myself, Adrian, it was a case of diving into the early stage startup landscape. I’ve always been a proponent of the idea of an information diet. I kind of remember Tim Ferriss, or maybe, Seth Godin, that said, everyone is the average of the five people, books, podcasts that they consume or associate themselves with. And I approach that from the perspective of, hey, this is my first VC backed organisation that I’m going to work for. Therefore, I’m going to be very intentional about all the inputs I’m putting into myself, so I consumed Y Combinator startup school on YouTube. I read everything in the first round review. I subscribed to all the podcasts 20 VC in depth, but by first round etc., etc. And it just reshaped our heuristics. And I think in those first three months Daniel and I, I like to think we’re transformed as individuals in terms of how we thought about the business. And from that point, we actually then said, Okay, we’ve got a strong idea now of the culture that we need, because we’re now more immersed in this concept of what it means to scale a VC that business. And so for us, it was about codifying that culture. And then Netflix had this culture that we’re like, hey, let’s have a VI version of it. And Den and I put down some values, put down some operating principles. And then we shared that with some of our other senior folk, and said, Hey, what do you think of this? Like, do you think this is the organisation that we want to build? And are there any immediate iterations you think we need? Of course, there were a couple, but then he was like, Okay, well, good. This codified culture that is now in place, right? This is effectively the manual that we want everyone joining the organisation to look at, because we know we were start-ups, everything needs to be figured out, and you don’t have the answers. So with a culture deck, it’s a case of, well, here’s how we expect you to operate in that environment. So we have some operating principles, we talk about, okay, we don’t discuss problems about solutions. And we tactically say every time there’s a problem, we want you to be proposing to your manager at least two or three solutions. Now, transparency, being another thing, moving very fast as well, very, very fast is nothing because we know, all things being equal it’s all about speed, and execution. So all of these premises were in the culture deck. And we’ve gone with it with the view that hey, if your manager or boss isn’t around, culture is what dictates what your employees are doing. And in the Remote Setup, and in the distributed team, that VI is that’s even more important, because the manager or sometimes he’s never around physically. Now, how did we change of getting CRCC Asia folks out of here into that culture. And to be honest, over the last two and a half years, we’ve seen some churn, we’ve seen some churn Adrian, because actually those who have stuck around from CRCC were still would be VI had mentioned that and really embrace the culture that’s needed for an early stage startup. Those that haven’t, they’ve stepped away because they haven’t been able to work in an environment where the answers aren’t there, those individuals better suited to environments where there’s clear structure is less chaos. And they can be told, okay, here’s your job. And this is what your jobs going to be for the next 12 months. And so actually, we have 15 to 20 people that we brought over from CRCC, it’s about 75% of those have now moved on to a different organisation. So the five or six are remaining, are those who now fully embraced in this idea of okay, here’s how you build and scale an early stage business.

Adrian Latortue: Wow, 75% that’s incredible. I mean, it’s like culture as a forcing function that moves people out of the organisation, not in a negative way. But even if you’ve worked with them before, and you have this chemistry doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right for that team, or that company.

Adrian Latortue: As you’re hiring, you know, do you have junior hires as members of the early team? Is that something that you’re focused on?

Jason Kan: Yes. So in the first 12 months, or certainly during our like pre-seed and seed stage, we leant on recruiting a lot of junior hires, who are students or recent graduates. And we thought this fit the business on so many fronts. But the main one was actually this whole factor of coachability, and learnability. Because we know that when you tend to hire more experienced folks harder as a coach, and more default settings, etc. So with the entry level talent, we built, you know, some screening processes to identify those who have potential. And then once they joined VI, we kind of then made sure we had intention mechanisms to develop them to become world class generalists in effect, that we’ve got numerous examples of folks who joined us as interns who are now just doing amazing things in the business, we have one associate who joined us when she was a final year student in early 2021. Now, she is kind of the architect of our company wiki, which is kind of an open source handbook for employees. So there was a lot that went around to identify early stage talent, and then also nurturing them along.

Adrian Latortue: After these junior hires, they join the organisation, how much have they been thrown in the deep end? In a lot of organisations let’s just work this dump and go out there and do it right. And we don’t really care how you do it as long as you get done. How much are you delegating to these junior hires as they get started?

Jason Kan: I say there’s still an element of here’s a problem piece. Go solve it. Because we put a lot of emphasis on the kind of the screening, we’re fairly confident that if we were to give them a problem, they could go and figure it out, per se. But to answer your question more directly, once they were within VI, one thing that we often did, to encourage managers to with the interns is, every week, set your intern a task to say, hey, I want you to go read or consume some content that’s relevant to an early stage startup. And next week, come back to me what you learn. And this compounding interest of finding information learning on it, you know, their information that was being shaped as well. So their management wasn’t necessarily like, telling them how to do things, but they were telling them, okay, here’s the information sources, where it’s going to shape your approach to solving a problem. And so then they started to be assimilated into this idea of here’s how you can operate and do well. And here’s the tactics that are relevant to let say an start-up, whatever piece you’re working on, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s product, whether it’s HR, etc. Again, we were trying to tell them from a learning and development perspective, we want to make you world class generalists, because the vast majority of entry level talent, they don’t necessarily know the pathway they want what they do it’s almost like, you know, a superficial perception of what they want in their careers and so we’ve our intern talent when they’re in at VI, we’re like, hey, you know what we were going to throw a whole variety of tasks on you that take copywriting that take sales that take a bit of negotiation, etc. Because the idea is that A you’re going to develop some of these skills and B eventually you’re going to find the areas that you really like and specialise on. And that’s how the example I made earlier about one of our associates who is now the owner of our company, wiki, she love products, she love thinking about, you know, the psychology of the user, you know, the information architecture, the UI, UX design, and like hey, you know what, obviously that is a big ask for you to work on like our design the product for our customers, but what about if we thought about a product for our internal customers, our staff, go build us a company wiki and treat it like a product, think about what needs to go in there, how to design that and so she mentioned leverage all those skills that she’d kind of discovered that she loved and was now in a role that fits her piece. And obviously, what’s the business.

Adrian Latortue: Amazing thing about that is it’s really taking and building a system for this information diet and using that information diet to kind of uncover, unlock these interests and these hidden skills and opportunities for each individual members of the team, especially when they’re junior.

Hau Ly: So Jason, you and Dan, were already based in Vietnam, when you took over Virtual Internships. And you have team members, right? Who were based in the UK, and some of the first hires that you made afterwards, there were also based somewhere else. So it sounds like from the early days of Virtual Internships team was already very distributed. Why was that the case? Wouldn’t it have been easier for you to just have a team in one place to collaborate, to manage?

Jason Kan: Theoretically, yes. But a lot of the time, at that stage of a company, you just have to be resourceful, and do what the situation is so. So a lot of those members and staff we brought over, yes, they were based in the US, Australia, UK, China, etc. And so maybe it wasn’t for any initial intent that we wanted to go and just the team. But this is the team that we had, in necessity is the mother of invention. So let’s lean into this and truly become a remote first organisation. And I would argue that that served us well on so many fronts, by having a globally distributed team then because we were forced to adapt with new policies and processes and a compensation philosophy that was benchmarking below on the local market. And so we just leaned into it.

Hau Ly: Got it. And now the Virtual Internships team has grown and become even more distributed, right? You have team members in something like 25 plus markets. Tell me a little bit more about that evolution, and how have you thought about building this very distributed team, even like new hires, for success?

Jason Kan: So we’ve gone from being I suppose, a hybrid remote in early 2020, where we had lots of folks around the world but the Vietnam office was still almost a decision making office with myself, Dan, and then Director finance, etc. to be it now more remote first, but that journey to Remote first for two and a half years has been an interesting one. And a few things we’ve learned, I suppose to make an effective, globally distributed remote first team is number one it’s for us about documentation, there’s a fine line here, because you don’t be corporate, you don’t have to document everything. But we solved that by having the company wiki of ours built, we treated the company wiki as this golden source, whereby whether you are in Australia, or whether you are in California, and your manager wasn’t online, and you didn’t know, you know where to find something, you should just go on to the company wiki, and that’s your first port of call. It’s almost like the internal Google. And we’re like, okay, let’s document all of our key processes from the HR front, product front, etc. in the company wiki, you don’t know what our product roadmap is, don’t set a company wiki. You don’t know how are we progressing against a company’s targets down to the company wiki like that it was all that information’s. The documentation was a key part of that. The second part was this conversation philosophy that we built is the notion that, okay, look, we’re going to hire from many different locations. Now, there’s various ways of approaching compensation philosophy, I think buffer has one, which is based on these salaries in the US has applied a cost of living formula, we took a different approach, we were like, let’s localize to the market. So if an individual is based in the UK, and they’re in a sales role, we will look at sales roles in the UK and aim for a certain percentage. And we’re very clear and open about our compensation philosophy, because then that enabled us to say, okay, look, wherever you’re applying from, you know, here’s the formula we’re going to use to calculate your salary. And there was that level of transparency there. So that helped with the hiring front. And then when it comes to like the onboarding side of things, they go through the company Wiki and directs them to resources they should be reading. And then on that very first week, Dan or myself who speak with them. And we do have people ops or head of HR until like employee 50. And that’s another lesson that we’ve learned, definitely hire a people person when you get to like 30, or 50. Because actually, a lot of your problems are actually people’s problems. Everything now is optimised for remote first, or whether someone’s joining in Vietnam or, when someone’s joining in UK, like they’re going to go for the same fundamental process and procedures.

Hau Ly: Great, thanks for sharing that. So it sounds like you really went from being remote as a necessity, as you would put it, and then kind of gradually morphed into this very intentional remote first organisation. Right? So that’s great. How do you socialise a new hire, given that your team has members in 25 plus countries how do they connect with each other?

Jason Kan: We’re still continuing to solve this, to be honest, you know, employee engagement it’s a big factor, I recognize that, you know, there’s a challenge around being distributed, you don’t have the water cooler, kind of no chats, per se. But we’ve tried to build in certain mechanisms to kind of encourage us. So we used to have like virtual coffees, almost like a coffee roulette, where every month you’d be matched to someone else in the organisation wherever they were. On the other aspects each team leader has a budget and is encouraged to run like a monthly team building virtual events. So there’s a budget behind that they can be as creative as they’d like, I’ve seen events where the function has said, hey, everyone go work in the coffee shop, with the coffees on VI. And on this team building event, we’re just going to talk about this particular topic like the teams have got super creative around that, in terms of socialising elements. And then also, we have like a global or hands every six to eight weeks as well. There’s certainly more initiatives we want to be working on. The other thing as well is we’re looking to introduce something called like a working with me document or framework. So actually, this is something that I piloted myself, where effectively, it’s like a document, which is says, Okay, here’s how to work with Jason, here’s my operating system, here’s things that I like, here are the things that I don’t like, here’s how I like my reports to kind of work with myself. And you know, if you spot me doing these bad habits, call me out on it. And we want everyone to have you have that document and share it, but have it on Wiki, so that you like, Hey, I’m going to go speak to Adrian for the first time and I’ve spoken to him before, I’m going to read the document. Oh, I see that he likes, you know, cats, I’m going to make sure that I mentioned that, like, so those elements that helps with humanising the folks here in VI, because ultimately, we want to be more than just people behind the screen.

Hau Ly: That’s awesome. I’d love to take a look at that working with me, Doc, for you and your leadership team. Right. I think it would be interesting for us as your investors will also see that and then next time we have an interaction with you we can use that as a conversation starter.

Jason Kan: Absolutely. And unfortunately as a Google doc so you can track the changes. So like if there are a whole bunch of changes up this podcast then you got to see that, but yeah, happy to share.

Adrian Latortue: Jason, you mentioned that it is absolutely critical to hire a lot of people, and you know a lot of these things and socialising the team and building out this infrastructure for remote teams, then how much of that was the job of head of people, or how much of that fell on to individual team members across the organisation.

Jason Kan: So until we hired ahead of people, I was conserving in that function, my time was obviously very limited to certain duties so we set up a lot of the guidelines so that the managers themselves were almost serving as the first line of support. And that should always be the case, the first line support for employees, they wouldn’t necessarily default to HR, because there was no HR, we will just say, okay, here’s some principles regarding like, if you have an employee, who’s disgruntled, here’s, you know, a bunch of guidelines as to how to approach the conversation. If your employee wants to know when is their performance review, here is the timeframe behind that. So it was really a case of giving our functional heads and team leads just the baseline guidelines to almost serve as the people manager for the employees. Other aspects like talent acquisition hiring, again, that was a hat that I wore, and really, it was like, okay, what can I do to, in the minimal amount of time be most effective with our hiring support managers, so actually, I just built an inbound recruitment models we’re just going to advertise on many different places. And the top of funnel screening, we just created video screening, where it was very quick and easy for our functional heads just to look at it, and make a decision as to whether to move someone down the funnel or not. So we built mechanisms whereby they were, our function has what necessarily didn’t rely on central HR to function because that didn’t exist. But it was almost like a self-served, we put the mechanisms around the parameters around it.

Adrian Latortue: That’s really cool. So it sounds like everyone, in a way is engaged in this people management, and building out the people’s ops, right. And that people comes in, and, you know, they’re not necessarily building all these things from scratch, but they’re helping kind of tie them together, maybe improve some of the processes, scale them, etc.

Jason Kan: Exactly. The piece around hiring, it’s widely stated that it’s arguably one of the or the most important job of a founder or co-founder and from experience is two and a half years 100% agree of that, like you’re not many ways, not betting on a company strategy, you’re betting on the people. And a few lessons that we’ve learned is to hire the right person for the stage of business that you’re at. Now, we’ve made mistakes, where we’ve hired folks that, you know, have really stellar backgrounds with big brand names, but actually, that they’re not best fit suited to this early stage business. You want to hire those that can and have a willingness to get hands dirty and execute. And so in the interview process, always be talking about the how’s, ask them okay, how’d you do that? Who else was involved? You know, what was it like before what it was like after because the deeper you go here you can recognize were you the one responsible for building, you know, the marketing function from zero to one, we’ve had experienced hires who are very articulate, you know, they’d speak well, at a strategic level, but actually beneath the surface, they can’t execute, they can’t execute. Really, it’s always for me about, you know, ideas are easy executions, everything. So, making sure that you’re hiring screening is looking for those folks that can execute that have the curiosity to learn and figure stuff out, and also they are right for your right stage of business, right, because now that we’re a series, a business, where now we will bring in the specialists, right, I’ve given away HR, I’ve given position to folks who are far, far better than I am, who have had the experience of scaling, you know, similar stage businesses in their particular function. So it’s always a case of like, hire the right person for the right stage of business and be cognizant of that. Like, don’t be necessarily attracted by a shiny name or one CV if it’s not the same stage of business as yours.

Hau Ly: Awesome. There’s some really good nuggets of gold in there. So speaking of hiring, I know that when we go on Virtual Internships career page, there is a quote unquote, VIP guide. So Jason, could you tell our audience what the VIP guide is and why is it there?

Jason Kan: So, transparency is one of our values. And so our VIP guide, when you go on to it, it’s open and available to everyone. And it tells you Yes, our values, yes, our principles, yes, our compensation philosophy, I would join today our milestones, some of the things that we’ve had to overcome. And then also very boldly, we also say, why you shouldn’t join VI, you know, we recently we’ve got like, five or six things there of like, hey, you know, VI isn’t going to be suitable for you, if you don’t like this, this, this this. And so our idea is like, we don’t want to waste someone else’s time, you know, applying for Virtual Internships, and then recognizing generic processes we are not the right fit for them, and vice versa. And so our VIP guide is meant to kind of help address that. And it’s always an iterative process. And just to flat flex a little bit, our VIP guide is an example of one of our other values of moving very fast, we managed to create that entire thing from scratch in just shy of five hours.

Hau Ly: That’s awesome. Adrian, is it time for our closing question?

Adrian Latortue: I think it is. If Jason, you had to pitch Hau and myself on joining a Virtual Internships and leaving AVV how would you pitch us? What’s your thirty second pitch?

Jason Kan: Before I go into that, Adrian, usually during the recruitment process, if you’re applying for a role in VI, we have this thing in our ATS, which is called MIT, which is the most important thing apart from money and title. And this is where we have to ascertain what are the three things that are important to you? Is it impact? Is it mission? Is it work life balance? So I’m going to be relatively blind here because I don’t necessarily know what are your MIT’s so I’m going to go relatively generic, but I was going to say, look, I don’t want to pitch, I don’t want to sell Virtual Internships, I would say, go on to our careers page, go on to our VIP guide, look at our culture, look at our principles, look at who we are, does that fit? Does that work for you? Right, because we’re confident about who we are, we’re confident that we’re building a rocket ship that is going to help people become more employable, there’s impact in terms of what you can do, there’s also impact in terms of what we were doing in the world, we’re doing a good thing. We’re trying to make people more employable. So there’s numerous factors there, which I think make Virtual Internships stand out. And if you don’t believe what we’re saying, we also have a couple of awards, I think Escape the city in the UK ranked VI out of 13,000 organisations, the 23rd best in the world to join or escape to in 2022. And we’d score top for mission and impact. So there’s various factors here, which I’d say like reasons to join Virtual Internships, you can see on our VIP guide who we are, and there was no if that’s for you.

Adrian Latortue: Awesome. Thanks so much for sharing Jason.

Adrian Latortue: Unlocking that motivation within an individual and seeing what drives them is super important. It’s something that I don’t feel like it’s often talked about enough in like, recruitment process and when the motivations of the individual really align with where that company is, at that particular stage, but I think that’s where the magic happens.

Hau Ly: I think, you know, if you talk to all companies, all founders out there who are doing hiring, they would agree that understanding the motivations of candidates is important, but I love the fact that you actually codify that you build that into your interview process, right? You build that into your candidate profiles, make it part of the standard, the process that you have, and even put a name or acronym on it. So that’s great. That’s awesome. We might or might not steal that for AVV.

Adrian Latortue: All right. Thank you so much, Jason, for joining us today. Really enjoyed learning about the team at Virtual Internships, your journey through it, everything that you’re building, hearing off the deep lessons on culture, managing and especially bringing in junior hires in the best way to kind of bring them into organisation help them grow and make them a bigger part of the future of Virtual Internships.

Jason Kan: Great, thanks. Thanks again, Adrian and Hau.

Adrian Latortue: All right! Cheers.

Our Guest: Jason Kan

Jason Kan is COO for VI where he has helped design and scale the org from 3 to 130+ over the past 3 years. This has included building “minimal viable teams” in areas such as Host Companies, People Operations, Talent Acquisition, IT/Systems Management,  Operations, and Demand Generation 

Virtual Internships (“VI”) is the number one platform for guaranteed internship placements. Interns can unlock a network of global opportunities with talent-seeking companies, gain real-world work experience and gain an unbeatable advantage in the working world.