What An Employer Looks For When Hiring Bootcamp Graduates By: Alain Wong January 23, 2019 Estimated reading time: 2 minutes. Finding employment after graduation is usually top of mind for most coding Bootcamp graduates. Our Career Services team is here to connect students with our wide network of employers who are looking to hire. Huddol is no stranger to Lighthouse Labs, having hired (as of this interview) two graduates for their team! Read below for our full interview with Mark Stolow, Huddol CEO, to see what an employer is looking for when hiring Bootcamp graduates. Can you tell us a little about Huddol? Huddol is a social collaboration application designed to get community members working together to solve health-related challenges through curation of social contributions and insights. As a value-driven community, Huddol encourages members to provide meaningful, relevant, and well-considered contributions to member queries, ideas, or experiences. These contributions represent crowdsourced intelligence, both lived and learned experience. Contributions are valued through a democratized system of member voting with the generation of rewards mitigated through Huddol’s Collaboration Economy. The Collaboration Economy Huddol rewards members for actively engaging in their health by representing the value in their contributions in actual value (currency as rewards). The more active, engaged, and value making, the more the individual earns an intrinsic benefit as an active member of the community and an extrinsic monetary and reputation benefit, represented in Huddol tokens and a Personal Impact Rating (PIR – pronounced Peer), respectively. What consumer/business issues does Huddol address? Huddol is committed to transforming the healthcare sector by re-enforcing health networks that are for the people, by the people. We see an opportunity to change the way we think about the health of the population by creating a society with a shared understanding that health is first and foremost our state of being in the world, and that through our collective engagement, all people have equal opportunity for better health where they live, work, and play. How big is your development team, and what are their experience levels? We currently [as of this interview] have five full-time developers on the team. Our seasoned CTO, Andrew Hamilton, leads a mix of junior and intermediate developers. What technologies or languages/stack does your development team use? ReactJS, Redux, Javascript, PHP and Laravel. What has your experience been with hiring junior developers from Lighthouse Labs? The experience has been very positive to date. The two people we hired are active with the team, enthusiastic about our mission, and eager to expand their professional skills. Our hope is that we’ll create the right environment for them to thrive in. What issues did you face with integrating them into your team? No issues to date. The timing for their arrival was ideal as we were expanding our team - we could leverage peer-based support and learning to ease the integration. How do your Bootcamp students compare to a developer on your team from a more traditional background? While they may have less real-world experience, students also bring less baggage and can be more easily moulded into our culture, both in terms of how we approach the technology and the way in which we think about our individual and collective values. We try not to use the word traditional in the way we think about our team members or our product. What are the pros and cons of hiring a bootcamp grad? Pros: Fresh eyes and eagerness Cons: Untested What appealed to you about hiring a bootcamp grad? There is a very clear intention when someone goes through an intense bootcamp experience that they are committing to their craft. We like that type of commitment demonstration. We also know that we can put them into a pressured filled situation and they will be able to handle it.