When Inaki Berenguer moved from Boston to New York to start Pixable, a company that prints photo albums from Facebook pictures, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to take the chance on hiring a full-time employee. Realizing the odds for a nascent start-up staking claim in an economy that’s still rickety at best, he decided to go the safer route: find interns, reports Inc.com.
With an internship, if it doesn’t work out, no one loses,” says Berenguer, who co-founded Pixable with two fellow M.I.T. graduates a year ago. “But if a full-time employee walks out after two months, it looks bad on the company. We didn’t want to lose money.”
That’s when Berenguer decided to enlist the help of Urban Interns, a website that aids small businesses in finding interns, temporary workers, and part-time help. After posting a job listing on the site last September, Berenguer was linked with five impressive interns within three days — one of which, a 24-year-old University of Pennsylvania graduate named Loren Appin, is now fully employed with Pixable as a marketing manager.
“We started the site because we really felt like for small business owners, there was no niche marketplace focused on serving hiring needs for part-time jobs and internships,” says Cari Sommer, who founded the site with her partner, Lauren Porat, in February of last year.
Photo by Urban Interns.