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Comment by jaclynmling | Hacker News Reader

Hey there, thank you for sharing your cousin's story.

I think you're definitely right that a great place to target are programs outside of top 10 CS programs. I do believe we could bring the biggest benefit to these new grads. Do you have any suggestions on how to best reach these types of candidates?

We have also seen similar sentiment toward senior software engineers. I think something we've also noticed though is that there is such a demand for talent, that we've actually been able to convince employers to hire high potential candidates with no experience even though they were initially looking for a candidate with 2-3 years of experience.

Today, we actually focus on startups that have a challenge hiring themselves (i.e. because they lack large budgets and/or brand name), and so hiring "undervalued" talent is actually a great way for them to attract and hire talent!

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> Do you have any suggestions on how to best reach these types of candidates?

Perhaps a combination of creating high quality content hyper targeted towards this audience to help them identify companies to work at, prepare for interviews and how to apply & reaching out to programming student organizations, and CS administrations at these schools to set up workshops, etc. Attending career fairs could also be fruitful (or even better, setting up great virtual career fairs for these schools)

College administrators are incentivized to work with you - the more of their students get placed at companies, the more valuable their program becomes in the eyes of future students. E.g. my college used to heavily market av. starting salary and % students placed at graduation.

> so hiring "undervalued" talent is actually a great way for them to attract and hire talent!

This is interesting. I buy that startups without a recruiting brand want to hire undervalued candidates, but I'm skeptical of their demand to hire undervalued AND entry-level candidates / interns, given their stage where they likely need more execution power with less time spent on mentorship / ramping up. Curious to see how targeting this segment pans out in the long-term, but I'm sure with effective sourcing and screening, you can shift the company segment if need be.

Great ideas-- never thought about virtual career fairs, but that sounds very interesting.

You're definitely right that undervalued AND entry-level candidates is a hard sell most of the time-- but more employers need to start giving out work experience rather than just expecting 2-3 years+ work experience. So hopefully we can find more unique ways to help solve this "experience gap" problem as we grow.

The best thing that I can think of is to reach out to all the different colleges and universities and see if and when they hold any sort of career fairs / career information sessions for their about-to-graduate students. There are also career fairs that are more general (not associated with an educational institution, but a city or a state/province).

I wish you all the best with Hatchways 'jaclynmling .

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