I recently advertised a role and had over 2000 applicants (yes, really). The vast majority of applicants went through bootcamps. Personally, I'm fine with that, heck, I'm Head of Engineering and I'm a university drop-out i.e. didn't even complete a course!
One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp. When I'm getting 50+ applicants who are supposedly employees of the one "company" it immediately rings alarm bells and de-legitimises the whole thing. My advice to candidates, don't do it. Well, my other advice to candidates is cover letters, cover letters cover letters. No seriously, cover letters! When I'm getting 500+ candidates who have completed a bootcamp there's next to no way for me to differentiate between candidates based on CV and a few example projects on Github (though, yes, you should include those).
I’ve noticed that a lot of bootcamp grads are, in fact, legitimately hired by their bootcamps - just not to write code. They are often brought on term by term as TAs until they find work.
I suspect this practice is a bit disingenuous of the bootcamps, a way to pad their “successfully employed” rates while keeping labor costs low. But it is hard for me to fault the candidates for putting those experiences in their resume. They need that money to keep their job searches going, and recruiters are always biasing against gaps on the resume.
If you’re being paid by them for any reason, put it on your resume. (And if you’re not…move it to the education section, where it belongs.)
Good bootcamps won't need to pad their employment numbers, because they'll be producing good quality candidates. So all you're really doing is highlighting the fact you went through a lower quality bootcamp. There's so many bootcamps I don't know which ones are legitimate and which are scams. Without that signal on the candidate's CV, I'd have no idea where the one the candidate has been through ranks. However, to me that's a clear indication that the bootcamp (or perhaps the candidate) are dodgy.
If the vast majority of applicants from one bootcamp claim to be employed by them then I can see why you would be suspicious, but I’d be hesitant to throw out all bootcamp grads who say they’ve been employed by their bootcamp.
There might be perfectly legitimate reasons to be employed. Maybe they were aiding instruction of earlier students as they got more experience, akin to a tutor or teaching assistant in colleges. Maybe they took a temporary job because they were unable to find a job right out of bootcamp, and the reasons for not being able to get a job don’t necessarily have to be negative (e.g. they had familial commitments).
Getting a job from a bootcamp is already hard and it wouldn’t quite sit right with me to reject someone outright for something that could be explainable. Perhaps if you are drowning in applicants then you are forced to be harsher out of practicality, but even then surely there’s a better filter then someone reporting what is ostensibly an experience applicable to job they’re pursuing.
> Good bootcamps won't need to pad their employment numbers, because they'll be producing good quality candidates
If you make this the metric to evaluate on, you're going to end up with the Ivy League scenario where bootcamps only admit people who would have succeeded anyway.
The POINT of education is to give people a chance to succeed who were likely to fail without it, and you have to accept a failure rate for that to work.
> One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp.
I've seen this, too. At some point, everyone coming out of certain bootcamps was an "instructor" rather than just a graduate. I suspect one of them is running a scheme to have their own grads teach their own classes for reduced tuition.
I second the cover letter section. GitHub goes a long way, but it needs something unique. I know exactly what projects are taught at local bootcamps because they're in every single bootcamp grad's GitHub profile. Show me something you worked on by yourself.
You could probably message 3 random engineers at random companies and invite them to coffee and it'd be a better return on time invested for your career than writing cover letters. I'm not sure why you'd want to read 500 cover letters as opposed to reviewing 500 CVs.
And why on earth did you keep the job posting open to accumulate 2000+ applicants? Legal reasons?
One thing that irked me was bootcamps that have clearly told students to mark on their CV that they were somehow employed at the bootcamp. When I'm getting 50+ applicants who are supposedly employees of the one "company" it immediately rings alarm bells and de-legitimises the whole thing. My advice to candidates, don't do it. Well, my other advice to candidates is cover letters, cover letters cover letters. No seriously, cover letters! When I'm getting 500+ candidates who have completed a bootcamp there's next to no way for me to differentiate between candidates based on CV and a few example projects on Github (though, yes, you should include those).