Selecting and onboarding volunteers

Written by Gijs Corstens (HackYourFuture)

Introduction

After the recruiting process you will have to select and onboard your volunteers. This is an important part of the job, as the your teachers are a huge part of your culture and the quality of your school.

Selecting volunteers

With regards to selection we highly recommend working only with programmers who are actively coding professionals with the relevant stack. This guarantees that they teach our students practices that are actually up-to-date and are used on the workfloor. If you have teachers that don’t work with the stack you teach, it’s important to monitor whether they teach the best practices and don’t use outdated methods of coding.

During the selection process we look for 3 crucial sets of skills:

• Being a skilled developer around a subject we teach
• The ability to communicate to both the students and the rest of the team
• The ability to take ownership and be reliable

Please note: There are a lot of developers that are great in their work, but miss the ability to communicate or to work together in a team.

Onboarding

Usually we have a look at the Github/Linkedin of a potential volunteer, and read the application letter. Based on this we decide to invite a potential volunteer to come observe a class. Then we ask them to read our information guide for teachers, beforehand, and simply have them decide whether they see themselves able to teach, or to contribute in another way. When volunteers feel capable of teaching, we pair them with a more experienced teacher, and have them teach a module of 3 weeks together (3 sundays in a row). The new teacher can depend a bit on the senior-teacher, but is encouraged to take initiative to take ownership of parts of the teaching. After this period we evaluate their performance (based on opinion senior-teacher, and student review). Based on these evaluations we decide whether we want to continue with a teacher or not.