For many years, I have run a team at Kids Activities Blog. We regularly publish between 2-3 blog posts and over 150 social posts a day. Because my team is awesome, I usually spend less than 30 minutes daily on the site unless I am doing a specific project or sponsorship.
When I decided I needed to get serious about content creation for this site, Holly Homer, and the social channels associated with it, I knew I would need help. And since there is no ad revenue rolling in over here, I needed it to be cheap!
A friend of mine suggested I try Gen M. <–if you want to try it too, that affiliate link will get you $25 off.
What is Gen M?
Gen M is an internship site. The mentor pays the platform $150 a quarter to train an intern in exchange for their free labor. The intern agrees to a three month assignment of 10 hours a week.
Why Would An Intern Agree to Gen M?
I wondered why someone would agree to work 10 hours a week for free and started asking some of the prospective interns that I talked to. It appears that there are two major reasons why interns are willing to participate in Gen M:
- To gain skills through hands-on work that they would normally have to pay to learn.
- To become invaluable to a company for potential future employment.
How Does Gen M Work?
The Gen M platform walks new users through the process pretty easily. There is an initial checklist of tasks to complete before hiring your first intern. That checklist includes:
- Become a member.
- Complete your profile.
- Watch the introduction video.
- Download the mobile app.
- Send 15 Chat Requests.
Here are some specifics about each of these steps…
1. Become a Gen M Member
The first step is to select the type of account you will be creating. For hiring an intern, I chose “I’m the business”:
The next step is to fill out basic business information:
Decide how you will pay:
Gen M Pricing
Basically, it is $49/mo. to “hire” an intern for 3 months.
The lifetime free access with 9 referrals is incentive to share.
Complete Your Profile
You will be asked to list accomplishments, resume skills, marketing skills and apprenticeship tasks.
There is a wide variety of skills and tasks to choose from.
I listed my top marketing skills as content marketing, SEO and social media while seeking the apprenticeship tasks of content marketing, SEO and social media.
You can choose whether your profile is public or not. I highly recommend having it public so that interns are reaching out to you. More on that in a bit…
Watch the Gen M Intro Video
This covers the basics and references the need to have a call with someone at Gen M. For some reason, this never came up again. There was no place that was obvious to schedule this call and no one from Gen M requested that I do it.
I ended up going through the entire hiring process without speaking to anyone at Gen M.
Download the Gen M Mobile App
The Gen M app is great for quick communication back and forth with prospective interns. It does not have scheduling or call capabilities which would have been helpful to know ahead of time.
It appeared that most of the prospective interns that I communicated with were on the mobile app. But then there was multiple technical breakdowns to scheduling a call through Gen M or actually making that call. My experience was that it worked about 50% of the time if both parties were on desktop.
Send Out 15 Chat Requests
The good news is that you can “star” potential interns and message up to 15 at a time with the same message.
The bad news is that when I did this, I saw less than a 20% response rate.
What Worked for Me in Gen M
I noticed that the people who messaged me were more excited about the position than the ones I reached out to through the platform.
Since they are working for free, it became apparent that their desire for the skills I was going to teach was the most important factor. I developed a paragraph that outlined exactly what they would do and learn as a response.
When someone was still interested after that, I would request a sample of their writing…any writing. I was glad I did this because it weeded out some people immediately who sent me things with poor grammar. Since this internship will be heavily SEO, the ability to write is essential.
If their writing sample looked good, I would schedule a call through the Gen M platform using the scheduler and then the phone or video conference buttons.
My goal for the call was to make sure of the following:
- They could follow directions and get on the call.
- We could understand each other — this isn’t just about language!
- They were willing and excited.
- That they had time to devote to the position.
- They wanted to learn what I was going to teach.
I was able to narrow down the candidates through interviews (mine were pretty short) and then when I found someone that would be a good fit, I offered her the position.
Hiring an Intern with Gen M
Once we both agreed, I clicked on the Apprenticeship button inside Gen M:
The contract between parties pops up next and both can sign electronically. Once that is completed, that button in the dashboard is replaced with a countdown timer:
Thoughts on Gen M
Overall the process was simple. The biggest frustration I had was the lack of response from messages that I sent out. Once I realized that I was better off working with the people that messaged me, that made the process smoother.
The other thing that I would recommend is to try and hire as quickly as possible. It appears things move pretty fast on the platform and in two cases a top candidate reported they had already accepted a position before I could get together my offer.
I had to keep reminding myself that this is free. When you factor that into the equation, the response rate and level of expertise is good.
$25 Off Gen M
Grab $25 coupon code for Gen M by using this link: https://genm.co/r/0lti410m5
Their referral challenge will earn money off with each referral and eventually lifetime access for free.
I will share more about my experience training a Gen M intern as the information becomes available…
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