Launch HN: Hatchways (YC S19) – Internships Instead of Interviews

Hey there, thank you for sharing your cousin's story.

I think you're definitely right that a great place to target are programs outside of top 10 CS programs. I do believe we could bring the biggest benefit to these new grads. Do you have any suggestions on how to best reach these types of candidates?

We have also seen similar sentiment toward senior software engineers. I think something we've also noticed though is that there is such a demand for talent, that we've actually been able to convince employers to hire high potential candidates with no experience even though they were initially looking for a candidate with 2-3 years of experience.

Today, we actually focus on startups that have a challenge hiring themselves (i.e. because they lack large budgets and/or brand name), and so hiring "undervalued" talent is actually a great way for them to attract and hire talent!

> Do you have any suggestions on how to best reach these types of candidates?

Perhaps a combination of creating high quality content hyper targeted towards this audience to help them identify companies to work at, prepare for interviews and how to apply & reaching out to programming student organizations, and CS administrations at these schools to set up workshops, etc. Attending career fairs could also be fruitful (or even better, setting up great virtual career fairs for these schools)

College administrators are incentivized to work with you - the more of their students get placed at companies, the more valuable their program becomes in the eyes of future students. E.g. my college used to heavily market av. starting salary and % students placed at graduation.

> so hiring "undervalued" talent is actually a great way for them to attract and hire talent!

This is interesting. I buy that startups without a recruiting brand want to hire undervalued candidates, but I'm skeptical of their demand to hire undervalued AND entry-level candidates / interns, given their stage where they likely need more execution power with less time spent on mentorship / ramping up. Curious to see how targeting this segment pans out in the long-term, but I'm sure with effective sourcing and screening, you can shift the company segment if need be.

Glad you're working on this!

I'm an experienced developer from a more traditional background - do you ever foresee the internship serving as a _mutual_ vetting process? I'd love to be able to experience a company from the inside before jumping from candidate to full-time employee.

I just signed up for Hatchways and filled in the profile. The next step says to do the assessment but that completing it within 24 hours would improve chances greatly. It's not clear in the instruction:

- Has the timer already started or does it start once I click on the [Start] button?

- Am I coding this in some sort of in-browser environment or am I creating a repository from scratch and submitting some sort of link?

- If the answer is the second, can I just use my own boilerplate? (ex: I want to do frontend and would just use my own boilerplate of React+SASS+Flow+Redux+etc. and ESLint+Prettier+stylelint)

- Lastly, my previous question makes me sound more experienced. However, I'm in a very odd spot. CS degree but switched careers to teaching over half a decade ago. I'm trying to switch back now but have no real experience other than being self-taught. I'm basically switching careers. Have you considered partnering with the various development bootcamps to tap their talent pool? How about partnering with online programs?

I think what you're doing is great. I hope you're able to make a real change in the tech industry.

Thanks for your comment. To address your questions: -no the timer does not start until you hit 'start' button! -you are coding in your own environment an uploading a zip file once you're done -Naturally, we have definitely a large in flow of candidates from bootcamps. We don't have any formal partnerships yet though. Would love to eventually see how we can partner with online programs as well.