Working with Makers Academy: What Hiring Partners can expect
In a nutshell, our organisation has a dual purpose.
Half of Makers Academy is dedicated to finding the best and most passionate talent around the country and Europe. Once we’ve found them, we coach them to become self-led learners and great problem-solvers. They then become amazing junior developers, in a variety of coding languages and frameworks.
The other half of Makers Academy is dedicated to finding the best possible companies around the country and Europe. Once we’ve found them, we enable them to improve their attraction, selection, onboarding and retention of developers. They then become experts at recruiting and retaining the best software engineers out there.
How do you do this?
The key to what we do is being insanely selective with whom we work, because our reputation depends on it. We optimise all decisions to ensure we keep an impeccable reputation, as this is our greatest currency in this world. This reputation allows us to build trust with our partners which subsequently means we can genuinely help solve root problems.
Why do you do this?
We care most about finding people a job they love. If they love their job, they’ll be delivering tremendous value to your company.
In order to love their job, your entire recruitment processes and your software engineering environment has to be right. This way, you’ll end up with developers you will not want to let go of.
What will working with us look like?
Before we can decide whether we want to partner with you, we need to understand the root problems you’re facing and whether we feel confident we can help.
“If we can, we’ll aim to implement the solution, and iterate until you’ve solved your problems.”
“If we can’t, we’ll honestly tell you so, saving you time, energy and money.”
During the first meetings, our team will take the necessary time to understand those root problems. You’ll likely come in with symptoms, such as
“We don’t have a big enough pipeline of candidates.”
“Recruiters don’t send us the right candidates.”
“We have a high churn of developers.”
We’ll then keep prodding until we’re comfortable we understand the real root problem(s).
Examples of root problems
- Your engineering culture isn’t doing well enough at keeping great developers.
- Your recruitment process is affected by unconscious biases that stops you from selecting the best candidates (e.g. job descriptions, bad technical tests etc.)
- Your onboarding process is inefficient.
The point is: we need to feel comfortable that we can help you. We want to know we can cooperate and trust each other on improving your entire attraction, selection, onboarding and retention process before we decide to open the doors to our amazing talent.
We owe it to you not to waste your time — but we also owe it to our developers. They’ve trusted us to launch their career in software engineering and the last thing we’d want to do is put them through a painful process in their first jobs as developers.
What do we look for in you?
The ideal partner to work with has the following traits:
- An approach to recruitment that is inclusive and thoughtful.
- An onboarding process designed to maximise the potential of the talent you hire.
- An engineering team that encourages learning and mentorship.
- An engineering culture that prioritises quality over quantity/speed at which software is being written, including practices such as Agile, TDD, pair programming etc.
- A willingness to be challenged and explore improving aspects of your recruitment process, including for example re-assessing job descriptions, tech tests etc.
- A company that wishes to help us make the tech world more accessible to all.
- A company that values our input into this world, realising we’re not merely recruiters, but we’re replenishing the market with the software developers it desperately needs.
Why should you trust us?
You shouldn’t without having spoken to us first! We fully understand that, having been bombarded by “recruitment consultants” so many times before, you’re naturally skeptical that we’re any different.
Unlike recruitment agencies, Makers Academy isn’t a “body” shop. We don’t spend our days on LinkedIn looking for developers. We won’t carpet-bomb you with CVs of people we don’t know (names redacted, of course!). We’re following the journey of our developers over 16 weeks, understanding their strengths and weakness and aspirations for their future roles.
We don’t pay commission to our staff because it may dis-incentivises them to do the right thing. We don’t cold call because we know you hate it. We don’t try and push our developers into your company because that would be wrong — for them as much as for you.
We’ve been acquiring knowledge over 4 years with hundreds of companies and over 1,000 developers we’ve trained along the way. We’ve built in-house expertise observing and consulting all those amazing companies on their recruitment processes. Along the way, we and our partners have made dozens of mistakes so that you don’t have to.
Aside from all of this, here’s a short list of what you can expect from us:
- To complete a full hiring process in less than a week
- Access to 24 amazing developers every 4 weeks through a Careers Fair
- Organising Craftathons as part of your recruitment process
- Expert advice on rethinking your recruitment processes
- Thought-leadership pieces on your diversity blind spots and what you can do about them
- Example on how we write job descriptions and why
- Helping you solve your broader tech spectrum with CTO support
We optimise our entire organisation for trust, and we’ll only work with you if it’s the right thing to do. Find out how or if we can help you: contact us here.
