Category: Trends

It’s a wrap! Here are our highlights from 2022

Before we say goodbye to 2022, here’s a roundup of what we’ve done and a glance into our future plans.

2022: A game-changer for us

This was a tremendous year for us: we’ve started a new chapter with Software Development Academy (SDA) and thus created the most extensive digital skilling center in Central Europe.

We’re also glad for the new partnerships, the variety of corporate IT training our partners entrusted us with, and for launching even more digital careers. We took an active role in closing the digital skills gap and explored further solutions this year.

Read more about our highlights from 2022:

A new chapter together with SDA

The main event of the year was joining forces with SDA and creating Central Europe’s biggest digital skilling and sourcing powerhouse. This means we’re now able to deliver a far higher number of quality candidates to our corporate partners. In the next year, we aim to train 15.000-20.000 individuals.

We also expanded our geographical coverage. We’re now present in 8 countries: Estonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Romania, and Albania. Our mentor pool has also increased to a whopping 1600 mentors, while the number of digital reskilling paths has jumped to 17.

But this was just the beginning. As the Central European region has the biggest digital talent pool on the continent, and there’s an unprecedented need for digitally skilled people in the next decade, our plan is to expand our geographical footprint and product offering further.

Large-scale digital skills training projects

We’re proud that we had a variety of corporate IT training and governmental projects this year, with clients including T-Systems and Generali.

We completed three rounds of Motorola Solutions Academy in Poland. For this comprehensive sourcing and training program, we’ve recruited and selected the participants, delivered their seven-month training, and supported their onboarding process as well.

Another project that we’re proud of is our collaboration with MindTree. We helped them recruit tech talent to provide technical support for Microsoft products in their newly opened office in Poland.

Within the framework of a program launched by the Hungarian Ministry of Innovation and Technology, we trained 400 unemployed people in 17 weeks. We helped the selected participants gain marketable skills and a state-recognized certificate as a front-end or back-end developer, software tester, or system administrator.

Thanks to the program, participants got a new chance at employment and started new future-proof tech careers.

Software Skills Strategy for Europe

As a member of the European Software Skills Alliance (ESSA), we’re developing and implementing a Software Skills Strategy, and Vocational Education and Training (VET) programs for Europe. We’re doing this together with 25 industry and education stakeholders, such as Adecco and Amazon Web Services.

This four-year transnational project aims to ensure that the skills needs of the rapidly evolving software sector can be met.

Increased talent base

We’re proud that in 2022 we had close to 70% more students than last year: this means more than 1200 tech talent started their Codecool journey this year. It also means that an increased number of junior programmers can land open roles at our partners.

We also launched new course formats for our flagship Full-Stack Development course, as well as several shorter courses, such as the Software Tester course in Romania and the Agile course in Poland.

After opening our campus in Austria last year, we already placed the first students at SSI Schäfer and SMATRICS this year.

We’re glad that thanks to our partners, we also managed to extend our job guarantee to other cities. Thus, companies can now hire our graduates in several major cities across the countries where we’re present.

Looking ahead

Overall, 2022 has been a year of expansion, growth, and dedication for us at Codecool.

In 2023, we aim to continue our work of offering the best IT talent and supporting candidates to become job-ready digital professionals in less than a year. We’re also looking forward to new partnerships with companies and governments to help close the tech skills gap.

If you’re interested in the solutions we offer and how we can help your company, don’t hesitate to contact us.

And to finish this year on a festive note, the Codecool team wishes you Happy Holidays and a successful New Year!

Digital professionals – who they are, and why they’re important

In the modern labor market, it’s getting harder to define who a digital professional is. Why?

Because the boundaries between those who use digital tools and those who do digital work are blurred. However, this must be clarified to tailor appropriate supply strategies to labor market needs.

We talked about the topic with the leaders of Europe’s two leading programming schools, Codecool and SDA, who recently announced their companies’ merger: Michał Mysiak, CEO, and József Boda, Vice President. We asked them about the demand for digital professionals, and how their newly merged company can help to supply these.

Who is really missing from the labor market? Are companies looking for software developers or people who can work well with a computer?

Boda József: There is a massive labor shortage in the market. At one end of the digital skills spectrum, you’ll find basic computer skills, and at the other, NASA programmers. Neither end is our area of expertise. But in between, there is a vast spectrum with countless ramifications and specialization directions. We could categorize them, but any classification can become invalid in months in this dynamically changing industry. What is certain is that the entry threshold is constantly creeping upward in most professions. In this way, the concept of “professional” is becoming more and more conditional and demanding. This is in the form of demand for new workers and, in many industries, the need to retrain and upskill existing workers.

Michał Mysiak: The cooperation between Codecool and SDA aims to serve this broad spectrum with as much coverage as possible. Not only in a geographical sense but also in terms of the needs of the employer side. We have relationships with more than 400 companies, from global brands to local businesses. We have the expertise and experience to train the workforce to meet specific, bespoke orders and foreseeable employer needs.

What ensures that Codecool and SDA are not only training workers according to their existing partners’ needs and preferences but also serving potential new entrants?

Boda József: Of course, our approach is much more far-reaching. We tailor our strategy to regional and continental trends. One of the key objectives of the European Commission’s Digital Decade program is to employ 20 million professionals in digital industries by 2030 while also taking care of gender balance. This European ambition can only be achieved through comprehensive sectoral retraining programs.

Michał Mysiak: We play a significant role in achieving this vision by bringing our companies together. The EU countries we cover have the highest public interest in future-proof and well-paid digital careers. Investors will come to our region if they can be confident that they can find the right skilled workforce, now and in the future. It’s essential to stress that everyone is generally moving up that particular ladder, so we also need to ensure that we can provide an open and evolving workforce to meet future needs. It is not enough to think of career changers of workers newly oriented toward infotech; in-house training and retraining programs are just as important.

In previous years, the training of programmers was usually linked to a career change. Does this mean that the new trend is for everyone to go digital within their profession?

Boda József:

Indeed, in recent years, musicians, drivers, tour guides, and countless other professionals have turned to programming and entered this career. But digitalization has become part of everyday life in most traditional industries. In logistics, commerce, manufacturing, and even personal services such as beauty care or legal advice, we are seeing digital solutions implemented all the time. Using, developing, analyzing, and visualizing the data that moves within them requires digital skills.

We have reached a stage of digital transformation where companies can go digital by quickly and efficiently upskilling their existing, loyal, skilled workforce without necessarily having to think about new people or outsourcing. The most significant growth – and the EU strategies mentioned earlier – is predicted to come from training within the sector.

If digital skills are essential for your business, look at our corporate training offers. All training we provide is tailored to your needs.

This interview was originally made after a roundtable discussion at the IVSZ Menta conference.

Innoveo: “A great place to learn and evolve further”

In our Inspiring Digital Employers series, we’re bringing you some of our 300+ business clients from 4 countries. Meet Innoveo from Hungary.

Our partners inspire us not only to become better employers ourselves but also to contribute to their success with great new tech colleagues, in line with their business needs and matching their corporate culture. We’re proud to be their tech training and hiring partners, and happy to connect them with Codecool graduates, the best tech juniors on the market.

Meet Innoveo, a company delivering a Swiss-engineered no-code platform that helps to build enterprise-grade software quickly and efficiently while streamlining collaboration across teams. They transform digital experiences and achieve business growth with a true no-code, AI-enabled cloud platform solution. This time, we sat down for a chat with their Service Delivery Manager, Péter Tálas.

Nice to meet you, Péter! Please introduce your company to us. What is Innoveo like as a workplace?

We’re a US-based company working on disrupting the no-code software market through our platform called Innoveo Skye.

No-code was a niche market 5-10 years ago. It evolved from facilitating function-specific tools to enabling a broader range of business employees to own their automation and build new software applications without coding. By 2021 the market size reached USD 6 Billion, and estimates show that by 2025 this will increase to USD 47 Billion and USD 190 Billion by 2030, so the market potential is enormous.

This type of application development has become a lot more mainstream. Customers are looking for software solutions that not only address their specific problems and can become a strategic tool in their organisation to manage various IT system challenges. We’re part of this hype now and are working to be in the front row and centre, which is fantastic.

Innoveo was established in 2007, and back then, we had our headquarters in Switzerland, our first location. The Budapest office was opened in 2014 as a delivery center for our professional services. Since then, we have reached more than 70 people in our local headcount and plan further expansions in the coming years.

I know of other low-code platforms with a presence in Hungary, but a genuinely no-code platform company doesn’t exist here. Thus, if someone wants to be a part of this market opportunity, our company is the right place for it. We have a diverse community of almost 200 working from the mainland US, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Hungary, Spain, and India.

We work with clients worldwide, including high-end players in the insurance and finance market. This is an excellent opportunity for anyone who is just starting their career or would like to evolve further professionally.

In Budapest, we upgraded the office multiple times in the past few years to accommodate the team’s growth and the recent challenges of the changing work environments due to the pandemic. We expanded our floorspace and added several meeting rooms and co-op spaces, including ergonomic furniture. We want to ensure that people feel comfortable coming to the office when needed and have the right environment to work together.

The company also provides excellent benefits, including private medical insurance, team events, and travel opportunities since our clients are all out of Hungary.

What type of software are you developing for your clients who’re present in the insurance industry?

Insurance business processes and operations have several challenges. We can offer many things to our customers, from simple quote-and-bind solutions in new business through managing distribution partners, brokers, agents, and agencies to offering customer portals, policy administration, and claims management systems.

However, our platform is not only built for insurance use-cases, as its modules and tools are made to build general building blocks of a modern web application.

Why are digital talent and skills essential for your business? What type of competencies are you mainly looking for when you’re hiring?

It depends on which team we’re hiring for. In the team I’m leading, we mainly have Business Analysts and System Analysts, who comprise the core of our implementation project teams. The first one is closer to a traditional business analyst role that you can see at other companies.
We hire people with excellent analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills for these roles. They need to know the software development lifecycles and how software requirements are discovered and structured into delivery phases.

When it comes to more senior roles, they need to have excellent domain knowledge in their respective fields to advise our customers on best practices and act as trusted advisors in insurance systems.

System Analysts are mainly responsible for the configuration work during our project executions. They have to have an innate knowledge of the platform and become a proficient user of it to create the best user journeys. They need to work in scrum teams of agile projects, so the knowledge of working methodologies of such squads is good to have upfront. We also guide them to understand how projects are being done in our organisation.

You can hear about the growing digital talent gap everywhere. What’s your opinion about it? How hard is it for you to find the right people nowadays?

Finding the right people has always been challenging, and you need to walk the extra mile – not because you might not find the right skills, but because of the human factor. During hiring, we check hard skills and problem-solving skills. But if a person has communication issues, we know that collaboration probably won’t be working with them.

We need to find personalities who fit in well with our team and are excited to work with our platform. In our last round of interviews, all candidates get a demo where they get a glimpse at how the platform works. It happens that they can immediately see how it might be easier to work with our platform and solve problems they had faced earlier in their career. So we can see genuine interest from their side in working with us in the future. Other times, they don’t see themselves working with it or just not getting excited about it, which is precisely why we keep these rounds and presentations to ensure mutual interest.

How do you grow the digital skillset of your organisation? Via hiring, training, both, or some other way?

We always get positive feedback on our onboarding process, a well-structured, usually 3-4 week long process that everyone gets when they join the organisation. They get basic and advanced platform training – they see the platform’s basic and more advanced aspects with real examples.

After this section, they meet a business simulation where they can get a taste of an actual project. They can live through some of the challenges our projects can put us through, like unexpected demands from partners, changing requirements, being challenged on proposed solutions, and so on. They can check how they’d react, and it’s always an excellent learning example; we can talk through the process, and our new joiners gather valuable learnings.

Besides our official platform user guides, we have community-edited knowledge repositories that should give ideas to the most common challenges and problems the colleagues might face in their everyday project work.

And from time to time, we have more specific internal technical training, like database or AIP development training.

We also recognise the need for other learnings outside our platform or our industry. Hence, we have launched a full-blown training platform, where people can freely browse among thousands of training, books and lectures on hard and soft skills.

What global and local trends do you see impacting your industry?

The no-code/low-code trend started eight years ago, but the market growth has been enormous over the past few years. This growth is a response to the shift towards digital transformation and the recently growing adaptation to remote work. One of the significant advantages of these platforms is that they promote high levels of business agility and significantly reduce the time to market and costs.

Though the last few years brought this significant growth, there are still a few challenges the industry needs to address. Fewer customisation options (compared to fully custom development), increased vendor lock-in possibilities, and security risks all work against these solutions.

At Innoveo, we are working on addressing all these aspects of the low-code development and increasing our competitive advantage. Nevertheless, the overall low technical barrier to entry and the endless development possibilities of the no-code/low-code will support the market growth in the coming years.

Why did you choose to partner up with Codecool?

We started to work with Codecool a year ago, and from the start, we knew that Codecool was an excellent match for us. We found that Codecoolers, when they graduate, already have those essential competencies that we need to be able to train them further. This is especially true for those who’ve done the Full-Stack Development course.

How do you see our cooperation? Why is it valuable for you? And what do you think of Codecoolers?

All Codecoolers have stayed and become great additions to our teams. We don’t need all skills they learn at the school. Still, we appreciate that they have a systematic approach and a full view of the development process, enabling them to understand our platform better. They are quick learners and gather all the necessary skills they need in two months to start working independently.

Plus, they bring some “fresh air” to our community because they’re young, motivated, eager learners.

What’s your long-term digital vision for your company? What are your most important projects right now?

We’re at an exciting period now, we’ve received quite a lot of funding in the past years, and we continue to raise money from investors this year, which will give us the ways to expand our teams further, improve our platform and services, acquire more new customers, entering new markets.

All this is super thrilling, and new joiners now come to us at a time when a lot of things are in the works.

How do you see our shared digital future?

It’s hard to see into the future; just think of how different our visions were 20 years ago of our life would look like today. I think digital automation, IoT, and AI trends will continue in the areas where they are already significant today, like personalised health care, mobility, smart energy, and so on.

It is hard to say how radically it will change things compared to the present.

I am interested in how technology will address climate change and reduce emissions in the energy, agriculture, and transportation sectors. At the same time, will it be able to keep its environmental footprint lower? Another thing I would probably keep my eyes on is the financial market regulations that will concern online banks, cryptocurrencies, and other financial services solutions that would leverage blockchain.

Finally, a growing interest in the metaverse is an exciting trend that keeps attracting major public and private funding.

Inspired by Innoveo’s example?

Reach out if you need great junior tech professionals or best-in-class training for your organisation.

Hope to talk to you soon!

ESSA launches a Software Skills Strategy to bridge the software skills gap in Europe

To bridge the software skills gap, ESSA (European Software Skills Alliance) launches a Software Skills Strategy for Europe — it is a stepping stone to answering the lack of software professionals and the future market’s demand for software skills.

The strategy presents perspectives and expert recommendations to skill, upskill, and reskill individuals into high demand professional software roles. It sets the direction of the work ahead under three important pillars: training, education, and validation. They are the starting points to design up to date, market-oriented VET (Vocational Education and Training) curricula and programmes for software skills in 2022.

Train individuals with self-paced and work-based learning. ESSA promotes increased access to the educational offering by addressing the main roadblocks to skilling, upskilling, and reskilling individuals into in-demand software roles.
Educate for roles. ESSA supports the development of flexible but widely applicable educational profiles along with specific VET curricula and programmes that are relevant to the software roles profiles.
Enable validation across borders. ESSA encourages international mobility by supporting portable and flexible recognition of the learning outcomes at the EU level.

Background

We have about 8 million ICT specialists in Europe which is far behind the 20 million target set by the European Commission. Meanwhile, the European software sector is growing — 45% of organisations surveyed estimate they will need more Developers in the next five years. There is also a strong immediate need for more DevOps experts and Technical specialists. ESSA wants to deliver the learning instruments people need to meet this demand for software skills.

About ESSA

ESSA (European Software Skills Alliance) is a transnational project funded under the Erasmus+ programme to boost software skills in Europe and re-aligning the educational offering and the market’s demand.

ESSA Consortium - Full & Associated partners

Full partners:
Adecco Formazione, AICA, AKMI, AMETIC, ASIIN Consult, BCS Training, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Codecool, DIGITALEUROPE, Digital Technology Skills, Global Knowledge France, Global Knowledge Netherlands, Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia, Hellenic Open University, HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Irish Computer Society, IVSZ, MODIS, UNINFO, University of Ljubljana, Warsaw School of Computer Science.

Associated partners:
Amazon Web Services, European Schoolnet, General Assembly, IT Professionalism Europe, NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute.

ESSA Software strategy upskilling

Twice as many students and the best IT education

How could Codecool continue a steep growth in 2021? What’s in the plans for 2022? Jozsef Boda, CEO of Codecool shares the details.

When you think about just for a moment how we expected 2021 to look like in 2020 … Well, things haven’t turned out quite as we expected then, have they?

Back then, we thought that by the end of 2021 the pandemic will be long over. After the first and then several more shocks, after the first and the second wave, with the help of the vaccines our lives can get back to some kind of a new “normal”, but at least a more stable state. Well, it didn’t quite happen like that.

Due to waves 3 and then 4 in 2021 we were “in and out” of our school in Hungary, changing from on-campus to online education several times. In Romania, it was online with minimal breaks. While in Austria, just after opening our school and our very first group of Codecoolers starting in November, we had to switch to online classes in line with restrictions.

But there was one big difference compared to 2020: however unexpected these sudden changes were, we were already prepared for them. We have successfully overcome unexpected challenges in 2020, too, but we weren’t even surprised in 2021. And we managed to turn them to our advantage even more efficiently – for example with further improving the online version of our flagship, full-stack programmer course, reaching much more aspiring students with it then with the offline version, available only for those living close to our schools. Who would have thought in 2019 or even 2020 that we’d get there? Not us for sure.

We have never thought we’d hire new colleagues fully online, not to mention senior managers, but we solved this, too, with no problem. Obviously, most of our graduates were hired by our partners in a fully online process, too. We grew up to the new challenges together.

In the meantime, we haven’t even noticed that we’ve entered the “new normal” we’ve been waiting for – probably because it looked a little different than what we expected. It was clear in 2020 already that things will never go back to how they were before, but we were not sure what they would end up like. By today, one thing stands out as the main characteristic of our new, post-breakout world: constant, significant change. What’s also apparent is that those who are agile enough to adapt and build on change will succeed. One simply can’t afford to wait for things to stabilise. That’s a waste of time, a losing strategy.

We’re so lucky and proud to have achieved so much in 2021, too. Let me mention just a few things:

We’ve placed our 2000th Codecooler at one of our hiring partners. Our first students graduated 6 years ago. We’re so happy that 80% of them are still with their first employer, the one we found for them. It’s a true confirmation of our shared success.
We’ve launched our very first scholarship programme, the CoderGirl Scholarship. Together with our corporate partners we want to invite and motivate many more women to start tech careers. The most talented and motivated girls and women from those applying to Codecool can now get a chance to study completely for free with us.
We’ve opened our very first school in Western Europe, in Austria. Together with Hungary, Poland and Romania, now we’re present in 4 countries already. Another step closer to becoming a leading IT education institute in Central Europe in 1 or 2 years, and later in the wider region.
We’ve launched new open courses. The one-week “Intro to IT” Course was first introduced in Vienna, while the six-month Cyber Security Specialist Course in Budapest. We’ve launched the fully online version of our Full-Stack Developer Course in all the Codecool countries, and helped more than 300 Hungarians to new, future-proof tech careers taking our short courses, fully financed by the local government.
We’ve further developed our corporate re-skilling and up-skilling training services, and launched comprehensive, tailor-made digital academies at some of our corporate partners.
Numbers taken out of context can only tell a part of the whole story. Still, the fact that we’ve managed to grow our revenue by 40% year-on-year in 2021, might mean something. It definitely means that we’re a stable partner for our students choosing us to help them switch to a new career, and also to our corporate partners, counting on us to boost the digital skillset of their organisation in the short and long term.

What we see is that digital transformation at companies is speeding up, now in departments and functions previously requiring only non-tech, business-side competencies. More and more capacities and skills are needed in IT, as well as in newly forming, business-side digital roles, and we can’t even come close to meeting the market demand, due to the limited number of our graduates. We’ve managed to place each and every Codecool graduate last year who chose to take our job guarantee, while developing and delivering more fully tailor-made corporate training programs than ever before.

We would like twice as many students to start studying with us in 2022 than in 2021. But we accept no compromise on quality, what’s more, we will further improve our courses and services, just like ourselves.

Our Full-Stack Development Course is more than a bootcamp, and better than a university. A one-year, comprehensive programming course with a job guarantee and post-payment options not only providing a wide and deep knowledge of software development, but also a real job at one of our corporate partners. We would like to make this offer to even more ambitious and committed career-changes in 2022, so we’re extending our job guarantee to the online version of our Full-Stack Development Course in every Codecool country.

We can only be efficient and authentic at the same in what we do, if we are efficient and authentic ourselves. If all our colleagues truly believe in the mission, values and methodology of Codecool, and if they can also represent them and share them with others. The way to achieve this was different 6 years ago, when we were a young, promising start-up venture, and it is different today, when we are a mature, internationally present, and still dynamically growing scale-up company.

To increase our flexibility and innovation power despite the sudden growth of our own organisation, too, we’ve started a comprehensive mid-management development programme. And to keep up with the demand for our corporate services, a dedicated professional team will be responsible for the development and delivery of our corporate training programs and internal academy solutions from 2022.

And now that I’ve mentioned our organisation and my colleagues – let me say thank you to them for their valuable work all year in 2021. Because the thing is that it wasn’t about getting lucky. Whatever we’ve achieved as Codecool is the result of their hard work. Each and every of my Codecool colleagues has contributed to our successes with their enthusiasm, perseverance and skills, and I’m personally really grateful that I have the chance to have been working on shared goals together with them every day.

As a final conclusion, I have to say that after 2020, 2021 was another year full of challenges. The successes we’ve achieved haven’t come easy. We’ve worked for them really hard together. I admit, I got quite tired by the end of the year. I needed the holidays to recharge my batteries.

But I’m starting the new year full of new energy and motivation, I hope you feel the same. I trust that we’ll have an as exciting and fruitful year in 2022, as we had in 2021.

I wish a happy and successful new year to all of us, and that we make even more dreams come true, by helping even more successful, future-proof, tech careers to start, together.

education programming school recruitment reskilling strategy upskilling

Find your match – 5 tips to hire better tech talent

Still looking for the perfect junior developer? Or you’re just beginning the process of searching for a new addition to your team? We’re here to help you upgrade your recruitment practices and find great talent while you’re on the search.

The war for great tech talent is as real as ever. On top of the ever growing digital talent gap, the information you have on candidates is often insufficient. So it’s hard to make quick, yet well-balanced decisions during the hiring process.

It’s even more difficult to assess the skills of junior developers, often without a track record. They come from widely different backgrounds, often lacking professional experience, which means a lack of information for you. Do they work well in a team? Is there up-to-date, relevant knowledge behind the points you see listed on their CVs? Can they handle challenges, conflicts, and constructive feedback? All these questions left unanswered can lead to you not hiring a promising candidate and passing great developers by.

So what more can you do to find the best talent, on top of your current efforts? Read on to find our 5 tips.

But first, let’s see the top challenges hiring managers face while recruiting juniors.

Hiring junior developers? Here are some typical challenges

From CodinGame’s latest developer survey, we learned that finding qualified developers was 2021’s biggest recruitment challenge for 61% of HR professionals. No wonder it’s difficult to recruit great junior developers either. The process isn’t easy for a number of reasons, and it’s weighed down by some typical challenges:

Job portals are useful, but have their limits

It’s natural to start searching for candidates on job portals, however, they can give an illusion that the talent pool is smaller than it actually is. Profiles don’t usually follow strict conventions and often lack information, therefore it’s difficult to compare them. And even when candidates create amazing profiles, it’s good to keep in mind that they’re able to write just about anything about themselves. Missing reliable information on candidates often results in overlooking good developers and going too far with mediocre ones.

Future potential is hard to estimate

It can be tempting to hire someone for a specific programming language that they’re a pro at currently. However, a great junior’s job is to be a motivated learner too, to be able to grow into an invaluable senior later. Someone with amazing tech skills might be the obvious first choice. Then, the same person might turn out not to have the motivation to learn or adapt to their new workplace, get frustrated by challenging projects or be hurt by or indifferent to constructive feedback. It would be amazing to see the future potential of candidates next to previous experience and studies, but it’s really difficult in a classic hiring process.

University degrees are not that relevant for tech positions

You’d assume that degrees help you filter out the best candidates. However, we learned from CodinGame’s latest developer survey that close to 80% of HR professionals around the world already recruit developers with non-academic backgrounds. Asking for a degree in today’s climate can drive away young developers. What’s more, it doesn’t really help you either.

The process takes ages

Your first instinct might be to invite a candidate to as many rounds of interviews as possible. To meet your decision-makers and to get to know them as much as you can. To give them filtering assignments, or invite them to assessment centres. But jumping through too many hoops can cause applicants to lose interest in the process. They might simply move on if it’s too dragged out.

But how can you learn more about your candidates?

We already wrote about what you can expect from junior programmers on the job market today. But what if you’re still looking for the right developer in the first place?

Here are our tips:

1. Visit your candidates and check them out at work

It’s a pain point in developer recruitment that you cannot really get a realistic knowledge of your applicant’s ability to code and present until you’re working with them. The usual way to do this is through a technical interview, an on-the-spot coding exercise or an assessment center. These are great solutions, but will not always lead to accurate results.

We rather suggest you to request to watch live demos of junior programmers at a programming school. Go see demos online or in-person, or invite promising students to your premises to do demos. You can get to know candidates much better this way, and check their individual skills in terms of coding, presentation, and interpersonal skills, and select the best ones for an interview. This is also a great employer branding opportunity for you, and an amazing chance for juniors to get to know you as their future employer.

Codecoolers demo their work to peers and hiring managers every Friday. If you’re interested to see them, reach out.

2. Pick a pro hiring partner that starts with understanding your needs

To speed up the hiring process and to make your recruitment efforts easier, it’s one of the best solutions to get a sourcing partner that really knows you, your business, and your needs. If they understand the way you do business, they’ll know what type of developer could fit in there.

Is it worth it though, to find a partner like this? Well, that’s something you have to decide for yourself.

At Codecool, we approach every new partnership with a fresh start, asking deep-dive questions about a partner’s business, culture, hiring needs, teams, tasks, preferred hiring practices, and a lot of other topics. After a short and effective briefing we’ll make sure that you meet only the best, most fitting junior developers that match your exact requirements.

And we are fast – you can have your new junior signing your contract in as fast as 5 days after you request one later.

3. Compare juniors based on an extended candidate profile

While external recruiters can bring you a number of developers to interview, they usually have time to talk to a candidate only once on the phone after finding them on Linkedin. This is a great starting point and can save you time.

Still, you’ll have a higher chance of finding great employees if you pick recruiters who have an active, personal connection with the developers that they’ll recommend to you. Recruitment Managers at Codecool take the time to get to know each and every Codecool graduate personally. Based the information you shared about your requirements previously, they’ll know whom to recommend to you, and can share detailed info on each candidate‘s skills, ambitions and personality.

4. Ask to see their project portfolio

While looking for the right junior programmer, you can face a simple yet daunting problem: a junior is usually not going to be the one to present you with an extensive, jaw-dropping project portfolio. However, a portfolio is what can best showcase a programmer’s actual skills and interests, so it’s usually a super important source of information when hiring digital professionals.

Our students document all the projects that they work on during their time with us. During our flagship Full-Stack Development course, they finish 20+ lifelike Scrum development projects and 50+ individual coding challenges and assignments. They’re continuously practicing their newly learnt technical and soft skills, and get used to handling different project roles, too. What’s more, after successfully completing the course, they spend their time working on their personal ‘love projects’, which are usually even bigger and more ambitious projects compared to what they’ve been doing before.

5. Look for truly informative CVs

We all know that recruiters spend 6-8 seconds reviewing a CV before they decide on the fate of an applicant, and around 80% of CVs don’t get shortlisted at all. So it’s just natural that while looking at multiple, inherently different CVs and trying to compare them with one another, a number of great junior developers can slip through the cracks. Plus, so many details that look dull on paper could be game-changers when shown off in the right way. Not to talk about irrelevant, or fake information that some candidates put on their resumes.

Our juniors all use the same standard, concise, informative CV format, which makes it easy to compare them. It’s not just a simple CV stating facts, but an interactive showcase of their projects fuelling great conversations at technical interviews. Individual Codecooler’s work and contribution to projects can be checked in detail through the CV, and all information included is guaranteed to be 100% legit and relevant.

Tech talent recruitment can be better

If you’re looking for your next developer, consider partnering with Codecool. We have a big and active network of quality tech talents and flexible recruitment processes, offering you quick access to top talents.

Growing your teams? We can help you find your next junior who could be in your team in just a couple of days after you contact us. The complete hiring process takes 4 to 7 days for our clients, from briefing through shortlisting and interviews to sourcing agreement. You won’t be wasting time or resources, and be ready to start work with your new developers quickly and efficiently. If you’d like to hire a senior developer or a complete new team we can help with that, too.

Don’t let your best colleagues go. We are also here if you’re interested in up-skilling or re-skilling your existing employees. We’re happy to tailor our flexible training programs to your exact needs, and turn them into your most valuable and skilled digital resources.

Your own internal digital academy powered by Codecool can cover the hiring, training and onboarding of your tech teams and colleagues, and provide continuous training for existing employees, in line with your actual strategic priorities.

Interested in what Codecool has to offer you? Let’s talk! Please be invited to visit one of our Demo Days on any Friday, too, online or in person, and check out the skills and capabilities of our students.

Hope to talk to you soon.