I've had very positive experience with interns. We'd recruit from U Waterloo, gradually get them up to speed on real meaningful work, and a few months later whe

I've had very positive experience with interns. We'd recruit from U Waterloo, gradually get them up to speed on real meaningful work, and a few months later when they graduated, we'd instantly have fully trained connections who were more than happy to accept a full time position from us. We had good success with incremental training (getting people pursuing CS, who had at least passing knowledge of what programming is), spending a few initial hours on the bare minimum mechanical tasks that one would need to start working on tasks (e.g. how to enter and style static content, how to google, copy-paste from stackoverflow, the works), then gradually supplementing with actual meaty training via lunch-and-learn format, with the intent to bring everyone (including other full time employees) up to speed with the latest and greatest techniques and best practices.