jaclynmling

- we generally give an average salary to expect depending on your skill level/ experience level, so both the candidate and employer going in with a similar expectation.

-at this time we don't offer health insurance but some of our companies still do during the 'trial phase'. It's something worth thinking about for the future though, thanks!

I was really touched to read your story. Thank you for sharing your challenges, and particularly around how you felt the only other option was to go back to school just to get the opportunities one would get by being a 'student'.

Here are answers to your questions:

-Most of our candidates will receive an offer in less than a week since we are able to shorten the interview cycle

-Yes definitely-- if a candidate doesn't like where they interned at, they are always welcome to come back on to our platform to get matched with more employers for a new internship

-We usually match employers with 2-4 candidates we think suit what they are looking for. We get them to interview them back to back (similar to the Waterloo co-op system) so they can evaluate and interview fairly, as well as make a decision quickly (hopefully by the end of that day)

-There is a penalty if an employer provides an offer to a candidate and in between the time they make an offer and the start date-- they pay half of the entire internship salary to the candidate

-Good last question-- this has not happened yet with us. Most employers are actually quite open and let our candidates know that they are allowed to interview and even accept other offers. I believe that most employers at the end of the day only want to hire candidates who want to be work for them, so if they are curious about other companies and want to take another offer, it probably wasn't a good fit to start with!

Thanks so much for your feedback, would love to answer any more questions you might have!

Yep definitely a fair point. Our assessments are building out full projects (so it's less easy to share answers/ get one person to do one question and another person to do another).

Secondly, we do meet each candidate for a 1-hour virtual call as well just to ensure their skills in person align with those online!

We just know candidates are more comfortable completing assessments in their own environment (which is what they would be doing on the job anyway) so we don't want to dock out points for people who get anxiety for onsite tests.

Right now we mainly onboard employers manually, and hoping to create the other side of the market in the near future.

Thank you for sharing and it sucks that you feel you 'wasted' years. I'm glad you found your way into tech and wishing you the best as well :)

Hey Pete this is great! Thanks for sharing. I'll reach out. Would be awesome if there was some way to help each other :)

Appreciate your comment! Will look more in-depth and perhaps reach out in the near future to pick your brain further (probably after the yc demo day rush though :P)

Great website and mission. Wishing you all the best too!

Love this analogy. Everyone showcases their skills in different ways, and we definitely want to help more people shine in whatever run they perform best in.

I would guess in most cases candidates can't fully be their authentic self or perform at their best during the interview process, so for me I'm not sure I can boil it down to "fit".

Our hope is that we can remove the traditional method so candidates don't need to go through a lengthy process as a whole, and instead get on the job as quickly as possible via one interview!

Thanks for sharing your story. Glad to hear you were able to overcome the traditional barriers. Great idea to explore design as an industry we can expand into in the future!

Thank you for your note on LinkedIn. I hope one day you'll come back and share your non-traditional story as well!

In some cases employers we work with are very open to offering visas for potential migrants, but because we mainly focus on startups at the moment this isn't super common (yet!)

Thanks for sharing your story. I hope your career transition has been rewarding since!

Thank you :)

I do think there is huge value in internship/ trial employment at all levels. We've personally hired a senior engineer this way-- she was working full-time and trialed with us for a few hours a week so she could get a better sense of our environment and team, while we could also assess her skills and fit. It worked out great, and hope more employers/candidates can view this process as a mutually beneficial vetting process.

Really appreciate that you, as a non-traditional candidate, promote non-traditional hiring now that you are an employer!

Great questions.

1. Codility (to my knowledge) skews more short coding challenges, whereas ours are more practical project-based assessments. We're trying to assess "can you build" versus testing computer science concepts 2. A few things have worked for us. One big thing is to position our candidates as fully capable of receiving full-time offers, but that if they move quicker (via one interview then an internship offer) you can sign with them quicker than they would finish up their full-time interviews, or else they may miss out on great talent. The other, is this "try before you buy" mentality around lowering the risk for full-time hiring. They already do it with students, why can't they do it with non-students?

Thank you for this.

It's a very difficult problem to solve because many employers are stuck in their own ways and going to go to big /enterprise companies and telling them they can't look at resumes if they work with us is usually an easy no for them. But we're hoping that if more and more startups work with us and if we can prove that this model is more effective for growing tech startups than hopefully, the big guys will latch on too.

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.

Thanks for signing up! We're still working on the dashboard side for employers so I'll be contacting you shortly to set up a meeting to share more.

High level-- we're trying to appeal to startups so our fees are much more accessible than traditional agency/recruiting fees!

Thanks for your comment. To address your questions: -no the timer does not start until you hit 'start' button! -you are coding in your own environment an uploading a zip file once you're done -Naturally, we have definitely a large in flow of candidates from bootcamps. We don't have any formal partnerships yet though. Would love to eventually see how we can partner with online programs as well.

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!

Great points and comments here. Few things to add: -one big benefit for our candidates doing our take-home project is that they only need to do one assessment that can they qualify them for dozens of companies. Rather than have to do 5-6 different take-homes for different employers. -Before a candidate begins an assessment we are very upfront with what knowledge and skills you will need before you start. If there is any way we can make this clearer, we'd definitely be open to feedback -At the moment, it is quite manual how we match employers to the right candidates (we usually do this by fully understanding what the candidate will be doing on the job and helping them prioritize the right skills based on that) -We try our best to give feedback to every candidate that comes on to our platform- regardless if they make it through the assessment or not. In particular, candidates who do interviews with employers we are very active with asking employers for feedback on a candidates interview performance so we can deliver more candid feedback than they could give.

Very much agree that candidates these days are not receiving candid feedback that they can action on after they interview with employers, and this is a whole other issue that needs to be solved.

Really like your story. Thanks for sharing! Really hoping that the more engineers, like yourself, that get into organizations and spearhead efforts to reduce bias, the easier it will be for non-traditional talent to break into the field.

Best of luck in your job search, and if there's anything that you think Hatchways can do to help please let us know.

We believe that trial employment at any level is effective and beneficial to both sides. For candidates it allows them to get a better feel of the work before committing, and for employers, you get a better sense of the person's skill level in your environment. We personally have hired senior engineers doing part-time trials, and this has been effective for us. This is something we could possibly expand into in the future.

This is great point! At this time unfortunately, we don't have the capacity to make that happen, but we are looking into partnerships to help make that possible for foreign workers

We initially launched this in Toronto and have recently expanded into major US cities like SF and NYC

That's great to hear - send us a message at hello@hatchways.io and we can set up next steps

We definitely think there is a huge value add to do an ISA after an internship-- which can further show our conviction of our candidates to employers if we are willing to up-front salaries.

We have in the past been able to receive government funding for some candidates that proved really positive for both candidates (received opportunities that they may otherwise not have had) and employers (to take more chances)

We do help employers gage appropriate salaries. We place candidates into tier levels based on a.) how well they did on our online assessment and b.) if they have any relevant work experience-- the tier levels relate to salaries that would be appropriate. This also allows employers and candidates to have the right expectations before walking into interviews.