Hiring developers? This startup cracked the code — and the glass ceiling
How Workiz’ creative investment in potential employees boosted their workforce, workplace, and work culture
The Israeli developer workforce is known for two conflicting problems. On the one hand, good developers are hard to come by. With demand at an all-time high, high tech companies are paying unprecedented salaries while hunting for the best plug-and-play programmers on the market, people who ideally have several years of experience from reputable high tech companies.
The shortage of experienced, talented personnel is so severe that it’s notorious for slowing down the growth of many startups. As a result, companies are increasingly looking to recruit an R&D workforce abroad. Workiz almost went the same route, but an outsourced team just isn’t the same as working with in-house developers. We wanted to have employees who are familiar with our culture and who become a fundamental part of our company life.
Everyone has to start somewhere
The other problem with the Israeli developer workforce is the explosion in unemployed junior developers. The number of students enrolling in computer science or engineering programs has only soared in the last few years, and the demand for coding bootcamps (including among ultra-orthodox Jews and Arabs) has never been higher. However, junior developers graduating from these programs often find that they face the same problem as juniors in any other industry. They lack the experience to get a job, yet they can’t gain experience without a job.
When I graduated from Haifa University back in 2009, it took me four and a half months to get a job as a developer. The funny thing is that when I was finally hired, my first two years in the industry turned out to be the most productive of my entire career. This is when you’re the most eager to succeed. Unfortunately, many companies pass on the opportunity to hire these young and hungry developers.
With my own experience in mind, I suggested a different course of action to our CEO, Adi Azaria: rather than recruiting R&D talent abroad, let’s offer fresh graduates the opportunity to participate in our own bootcamp — a two-month paid internship program with a chance of eventually being hired as a Workiz employee. During the program, each intern will work on a personal project with a mentor (a senior developer at Workiz) and present it to the entire company during the graduation ceremony. We weren’t sure how many of those graduating interns we would take, but we definitely weren’t planning to hire them all. Well, reality has its own way of taking you by surprise. We ended up hiring all of them.
An act for diversity
For our first bootcamp program earlier this year, we decided to hire two interns — then increased that number to five, and then to seven. To advertise the program, all the Workiz founders shared posts on our social media accounts. We also used a headhunting agency to reach out to potential candidates. Those who passed the initial interview were given a home exam to test general talent and potential. There was nothing related to past work experience; we just wanted to see how they highlighted their unique skills and abilities.
Out of about 300 total applicants, Yuval Halamish and Oriya Eizenman, both 25 years old, were among the final seven selected to join our bootcamp, which over time became known as “the academy.” Out of these seven, five of them — including Yuval and Oriya — were women: a surprising rate in an industry known for its male dominance.
This wasn’t by chance. We prioritized applications submitted by women during the hiring process in an explicit attempt to enrich the diversity within our R&D department. If we had not done this, the likelihood of women joining the academy would have been much lower. Even as more and more women study STEM each year, only 1 out of 10 applicants for developer positions are women. That significantly increases the chances of a female applicant being rejected compared to her male counterpart. It also makes it more likely for a female programmer to be only interviewed by men and even be the only woman in the R&D department.
Yuval, a Bar-Ilan university graduate, told me that seeing so many other women in the room on her first day of the academy made her instantly feel more welcome. Her colleague Oriya, a Reichman University graduate, said that having female colleagues made her more comfortable in the competitive environment and even in asking for help from senior developers. Newcomers rarely take an active part in ongoing projects. Even when they do, they often avoid addressing questions to other developers out of concern that this might show that they lack knowledge or experience. But at the academy, we encouraged active questioning as a valuable way to help our developers grow.
Mentorship becoming friendship
When preparing the curriculum for the new hires, we decided to focus on two main objectives: theoretical knowledge and mentoring. Managing and furthering these objectives were our own senior developers, who wanted this mentoring opportunity to develop their own presentation and management skills. Every intern was assigned a senior developer to accompany their personal and professional development from their very first day. Mentoring sessions took place daily.
I was pleased to discover that the interns and mentors had relationships that lasted long after graduating from the academy. These relationships later encouraged the interns to be more confident once they joined our in-house teams. The building of confidence worked both ways: some of the mentors told me that the experience motivated them to become leaders and apply for management positions.
Our in-house bootcamp had an added plus: unlike bootcamps that focus on general coding knowledge and development, ours exposed interns to our company’s cloud-based technology at its core. Our CRM system provides about 100K plumbing, HVAC, junk removal, locksmith, and other service professionals across North America with the tools they need to streamline their operations and scale. For our developers, that means endless opportunities to look for new ways to improve customers’ user experience and user interface. For our interns, this meant hands-on experience in the real development world, where process and product could have a real, immediate impact on a user base.
Individual employee development has always been a priority for us at Workiz. We encourage junior developers to approach the leadership — either their managers or me directly — for help with everything from professional guidance to career advice.
When Oriya and Yuval first joined the bootcamp, neither were sure about their career paths. Oriya was considering backend development, but only when all the other programmers gave her positive feedback about her work and kept saying, “you’re a backend,” did she realize this was her path. Yuval started as a front-end developer and wasn’t sure whether she liked it or not. She can now say that, with the help of the academy, she can’t imagine doing anything else.
Graduates also told me they learned more over these three months in the academy than throughout their entire degree. Not surprisingly, you can learn a lot more when you’re encouraged to ask questions. In fact, two of our academy members started working on core company projects before the bootcamp even ended simply because of their high skills and motivation — and an environment that made the most of that.
Less competition, more teamwork
Our interns weren’t the only ones who learned and grew from this project -we did, too. It was important to us to evaluate how the internship program worked, and see how we could make it even better.
The main thing we would do differently going forward is adjust the ratio of competition to teamwork. In our previous cohort, each intern worked on a personal project during academy sessions, which sometimes made in-person competition too fierce. As R&D teams don’t rely on one person alone, I want the next academy to focus on teamwork. We will divide the interns into two groups that will compete, maintaining the challenge while removing unnecessary rivalries.
I also don’t want to miss out on promising talents who aren’t necessarily coders. So, in addition to the full-stack training course, the next academy will feature places for QA and DevOps trainees as well.
All in all, the academy was so successful for us as a company that we plan to open another bootcamp in early 2022 with 10 openings. (If you know anyone who might be a great fit, send them this link to apply!)
The team effort that went into the last academy — from the talent acquisition managers in our HR department to our senior developers and of course to the graduates themselves — is already gathering steam and furthering the next academy. Last time it took us about a month to collect 300 applications. This time around, we have gathered the same number in less than two weeks.
The most important takeaway we gleaned from running the academy is that an investment in employees (and even potential employees!) is not a loss, but a gain. Companies can help employees form friendships, develop confidence and encourage teamwork, all of which contribute to the culture of a better workplace.
