How to hire and nurture junior candidates

Tech hiring is hard! Experienced and senior engineers are in huge demand and salaries are higher than ever. Yet the market is flooded with hundreds of junior candidates struggling to find roles. The graduate market continues to see far more candidates than vacancies and the emergence of tech bootcamps has added a whole new influx of people to the junior talent pool. Yet no one seems to want to hire them.

Are these candidates any good?

How do we hire and on-board them?

How do we make them an effective part of an engineering team?

I recently ran a poll on tech/coding bootcamps and whether people think they are worthwhile. The results were shocking - only 4% felt they were definitely good value.

The challenge our industry has is there’s a huge gap between the knowledge bootcamp or degree level graduates come out of their courses with and the knowledge they need to be productive engineers/developers in a real-world environment. Most companies leave it at this and walk away from the largest available talent pool on the market, but some companies have had huge success building programmes to hire and train these people integrating them into their tech teams.

As one of the most widely available talent pools in the industry this could be a game changer for all those development teams out there looking to grow. So, I’ve spoken to the hiring managers doing this, combined their experiences building and leading these engineering teams with my knowledge of the tech recruitment scene to bring you the blueprint.

“How to hire and nurture junior candidates”

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Peter Cresswell was recently engineering manager at Smart Pension, he successfully hired approximately 40 individuals integrating them into the engineering team within 3 months of hiring via an onboarding bootcamp and structured program he built. Here’s what he had to say:

"Having a well thought out programme that meets the needs of these candidates alongside those of your organisation is key to a successful onboarding. It’s a balancing act where both the candidate and the company needs to realise a three month bootcamp hasn’t taught them everything they need to succeed and is more of a first step on the path to becoming a productive engineer. The program I built copied the structure candidates are familiar with from the bootcamp environment combining it with mentoring and structured lessons on topics useful to the business. As candidates progressed through this ‘internal bootcamp’ they would be exposed to more day to day work through their engineering squad alongside having the support of the cohort they joined with.

It’s important to remember these candidates have often come from non-technical backgrounds and in some cases non desk based jobs. I’ve had people ranging from previous directors of marketing through to mechanics from a car garage so alongside the technical skills it’s important to also teach the softer skills around culture, meeting etiquette, office appropriate conversational technique and conflict management. Having invested so much in their future my experience has been that all the trainees onboarded through the program wanted to learn and deliver for their new employer, they just needed a bit of guidance on how to do so.

In summary I have found that a well-structured program along with some understanding of the journey these bootcamp graduates are on goes a long way towards having a successful intake into your business. If done right this approach can reduce the time to productivity from 6-12 months down to 3, making the ROI a lot more attractive."

Martin Whittington is a lead platform engineer at Antstream media and former head of engineering at Odds checker. Over the years he's hired and mentored several junior/graduates from various backgrounds, here's his thoughts:

"Starting with hiring - there are some key things I like to look for. Firstly, I’m not typically concerned with an academic background. More often than not some of the best coders have started in the bedroom, learning code from a young age because they have a real passion to learn and understand how it all works.

I also love to see a portfolio of projects showing a deep passion to learn new languages and methodologies. Whenever I give feedback to juniors in an interview or post-interview, I always suggest creating a casino in code; write each game (blackjack etc) in a new language and add those games to your suite.

Nothing trumps RAC; Reliability, Attitude and Character. These are the key tenets to look for in a candidate. Everything else can be taught on the job.

With nurturing and fostering your junior engineers, as managers we must strike a balance between keeping in touch with your team whilst not becoming a helicopter leader. Regular 1-2-1s also help. Finding out what they want from you, the company and their career goals is a great way to start their journey. There’s nothing wrong with throwing them in the deep end now and then. With your support, they will always swim."

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Hiring and nurturing junior talent can be transformative for your teams BUT it must be done in the right way. Having a slick hiring process, on-boarding programme and training plan are key to ensure these engineers succeed in the long run. Hiring these roles is a little different to most, focusing more on capacity for learning than hard skills and experience.

At Spectrum IT, we have years of experience in the industry helping teams hire everything from entry level to CTO building successful engineering teams from the ground up. If you need some advice or support on how to build a hiring campaign, on-boarding programme or any other market info don’t hesitate to reach out.

I'm Sam

?? Tech managers & HR teams work with me to fill their niche vacancies

?? Developers/Engineers use me to find their dream job

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Special thanks and credit to my co-authors Peter Cresswell & Martin Whittington for sharing their thoughts, experiences and insight on this subject