Recruiting and selecting students

Written by Gijs Corstens (HackYourFuture)

Goal of this chapter

Learn how to recruit students that are:

• Capable of finishing the program
• Have the ambition to have a career in web-development
• Speak enough English to be able communicate properly in the program

Summary of our learnings

• Motivation is the most important character trait to interview and look for in students
• Any experience in programming is helpful but does not guarantee a student’s success
• Test programming exercises are good predictors for motivation and, to a certain extent, talent for programming

Introduction

One of the most important things to learn as a code school is how to recruit the right students. In general we look for people that have a lot of natural talents and interests, but no opportunities to learn or work. Often you’ll be surprised how much talent there is within the refugee community if you look further than the surface, and are willing to invest in these people.

Over the last two years we’ve had 2,000 people apply for our school in Amsterdam. Of that group we’ve admitted 135 and as of writing we’ve graduated [x] students. Here’s what we’ve learned about recruiting and interviewing students so far:

First let us share our current way of interviewing applicants at HYF:

Step 1

Write a short essay about why you want to learn programming, and what you’d like to build if you could program well.Find the detailed instuctions here

Step 2

Learn the fundamentals of HTML and CSS, and build your first website as an assignment.Test assignment

Step 3

10 minute phone interview. To test english, hear more about motivation and see if personality fits the program.

What to look for in a student?

1. Motivation

In our experience the most important determinant of success in a coding bootcamp is motivation, not talent or previous education.

Doing a bootcamp is hard for everyone, and no matter how gifted you are, you will always need to put in hard work in order to finish the program. This is especially difficult for refugees since they have so many challenges in their personal lives. We see that the people who are able to persevere through adversity are the most successful. They quickly become genuinely interested in programming and get joy from sitting behind a computer and finding out things work.

The question is how to test this. We think there are two reliable ways of testing someone's motivation:

Step 1: Check for previous coding interest

If students have already tried to code in the past in their spare time this often shows a genuine interest in coding. This shows that the student at least has an idea of what programming entails and has an idea of what he or she is getting into. There are many people who have never written a line of code in their life and like theideaof coding, but when they start coding they hate it after a couple of hours. Selecting students who have coded before reduces the risk that some of your students drop out after two days.

We test this in the application letter by asking them why they would like to learn to program, and we ask them questions about their motivation during the phone interview.

Step 2: Give them a short coding challenge

In the second round of the interview process we have students learn to code HTML and CSS, and ask them to build a simple web-page. We find that 50% of applicants don’t even complete this assignment, which a good sign they won’t be able to complete an entire six month course.

When students finish the assignment we can conclude the following things:

• They don’t just say they will work hard, but actually follow up with hard work
• They can follow instructions (more on this later)
• They can solve problems on their own

In the test we don’t necessarily look for people who build the most beautiful webpage in the world. Instead we look to see if people actually understood the concepts they were supposed to learn and how much time they put into the project.

All of this is possible to track and organize using Khan Academy as you can see in the pullout above. We recommend signing up as a teacher in Khan Academy and giving applicants their coding test through the platform.

2.Talent

Of course talent and education background also play an important role in a student’s success. First of all, coding is not for everyone. You don’t have to be a genius to learn how to code, but it helps. We see that most of our graduates have a university background, or at least have the thinking capacity of someone at university.

Once again, the question is how to test this. Here’s what we’ve found works:

Educational Background

While not essential, a coding or tech-related background does help. In an analysis of our first 80 students, we found a weak positive relationship between a tech-related study and graduation rates. It’s not strong enough to say that every student should have a tech background, but when in doubt choose students that do.

Coding test

One of the things to look for in the coding test is sloppy code. Learning HTML and CSS isn’t rocket science, so if someone is struggling to understand these concepts it's unlikely they will be able to learn javascript. It’s also an indication that they may not be carefully reading instructions or have a strong enough grasp of English to participate.

3.Social skills

You may be talented, you may be motivated, but we don’t think that’s a guarantee for success. As a programmer you need to have social skills too. In our program we like to have a nice balance of people who have certain social skills.

This is required to:

• Work together in teams/ create a good group atmosphere
• Be respectful to teachers
• Communicate their problems well

Of course not everyone has to be a proper gentleman, but we allow little room for negative personalities in our school to create a safe and positive environment that students look forward to spending time in.

Of course it’s difficult to test this. We generally try to judge a person’s character based on their essay application and during the phone interview. I think you personally can judge well if someone has social skills or not based on these two applications rounds. Just be aware that some people are not very comfortable speaking in English and therefore might come across a bit differently than they actually are. Also be aware that some applicants might be very nervous. We advice to start a phone call with some small talk/jokes to make the candidate feel comfortable.

How to find students

1. Facebook

When starting out and not many people know about your organisation yet agood way to find potential students is to use Facebook Ads. One way that we target for students is to search by languages spoken in order to find people who are recent refugees. As an example, a code school in Athens uses these languages to select for recent refugees:

• Arabic
• Hindi
• Punjabi
• Tamil
• Persian
• Kurdish (Kurmanji)
• Pashto
• Urdu

Next, you might want to select students who have a specific background which may mean they are better candidates for the course. One such area might be a background in STEM. Unfortunately, Facebook does not allow you to directly search for Field of Study and so you have to first select for people who have a particular set of interests, in our case we chose to look for people who had interests in 'Computers', 'Free Software' and 'Computer Components'. If you keep on plugging in these search tersm eventually it will starts giving you suggestions for Field Of Study such as 'Computer Science' and 'Math'. We've found this to be a good way to get high quality candidates for the course when you do not have links to other avenues.