How to hire from coding bootcamps

Let’s say you’re hiring junior developers and you’ve got loads of applications. How do you tell them apart? Technical ability? Personality? Culture fit? Do you need them to hit the ground running — or grow quickly to become invaluable?

To start filtering candidates out, you might look at their work experience and qualifications. Which is obviously inefficient, but most people do it, so you’d be forgiven.

This technique is particularly badly suited to hiring people who’ve graduated from a ‘coding bootcamp’, like Makers Academy, as their previous experience will likely be impressive, but nothing to do with software.

You should be looking for reasons to say Yes, not reasons to say No.

What about the projects they did during their bootcamp? They’re all public on Github, but are also near identical to everyone else who’s done the course.

What about giving them a tech test? You could ask them to build an airport or a vending machine or a sentiment analyser. But what would you look for? Anything other than the usual stuff? Are you looking for their ability to bash out an efficient solution, or to craft something that’s prepared for future change?

What if they ace the test, but interview like a doorframe?

Of course, the big questions is whether you compare bootcamp graduates to university CS graduates? What if they have ten years’ experience in a different industry? What if they’re 42? What if they just graduated from an economics degree, but now (after just a few months) they have become a passionate and driven, if inexperienced, junior developer?

And you should probably speak to them too: find out whether they prefer spaces or tabs.

Oh wait! You could actually watch them do it. You know, do the code thing. Sitting next to you, sort-of-pair-programming on some basic problems — actually demonstrating their value — yeah, that would be the best way.

Doesn’t scale. Bother.

How about this?

FNZ wanted to hire a lot of developers, fast — but in Czech Republic. They discovered Makers Academy and found that what our students learn was exactly what they were struggling to find.

A lot of software engineering graduates haven’t done anywhere near as much actual software development as your guys.
— Mark McGlinchey, Global Head of Software, FNZ

I advised FNZ that the best way to hire several Makers Academy graduates at once was to set them a task and watch how they approach it, in pairs or teams. Something like a hackathon, but without the hacking.

FNZ took my advice and supercharged it. They invited ten of our ‘jobhunters’ to spend the weekend in Brno, accommodation, dinner and drinks included, with the condition that they had to write some code on Saturday. And hopefully get jobs.

This was one of the best interviews of my life! The company showed us the whole city and treated us as proper guests.
— Andrea Armiliato, March 2015 graduate, now FNZ developer

On the Saturday, FNZ set the group a task: build something related to our business of wealth management software. The group self-organised into two teams of four and one pair, and got to work.

All of the teams took a test- or behaviour-driven approach to building their web apps, engaging in frequent standups, writing user stories and delegating tasks. One group suffered a major setback, which they handled admirably, quickly realising their mistake and pivoting efficiently.

Their ability to organise, cooperate and just get things done is something we don’t see in most seniors, let alone juniors.
— Mark McGlinchey

By the end of the day, FNZ had seen all they needed to see. They were impressed and began putting together job offers. The trouble of moving to Czech Republic stuck for a couple of people, but there are now three Makers Academy graduates working in Brno; and another was so good he managed to persuade them to give him a job in London.

It’s actually raised the bar for what I’m looking for in a job.
— Joe Knowles, ‘Ronin’ graduate, now FNZ developer

FNZ plan to repeat this model over and over. Although they’ve admitted that our graduating 25–30 junior developers every six weeks is a little too fast for them.

We want to repeat and improve this model with every one of our hiring partners. To find out more about hiring top junior developers from Makers Academy, visit our website.

Originally published at blog.makersacademy.com on July 13, 2015.