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27 Jan. 2020

From a recruiter’s perspective – coming to Le Wagon’s Hiring Day

The hiring day takes place at the end of each bootcamp, where recruiters from leading Berlin startups are invited to meet graduating students and alumni. In this article, Chiara Schneider, HR Manager at Aroundhome (www.aroundhome.de) shares her experience of hiring with Le Wagon and explores the importance of hiring junior developers.

1) How did you hear about the hiring day?

Our IT department is growing strongly. At the beginning of this year, the IT department has become the main focus of Aroundhome (www.aroundhome.de) and has been built up to be one of the best tech teams in Germany. However, for a long time, we were unable to offer Junior Developers a good environment to grow with us. This has changed when our CTO Steffen Heilmann joined the company at the end of 2018. Since then, a lot has developed in structural terms. Today, our Tech Teams work agile with Scrum in interdisciplinary cross-functional teams. This new set up enables us to offer young talents the best opportunities to learn new things and develop themselves further.

We noticed how valuable Junior Developers are for our teams, especially if they don’t have the classic programming backgrounds.

The first Junior Developer hired was an alumnus of Le Wagon. With him, we have had very positive experiences and were able to learn a lot from him regarding our processes. We noticed how valuable Junior Developers are for our teams, especially if they don’t have the classic programming backgrounds. Therefore, we decided to join the Hiring Day and now looking forward coming back again and again.

Chiara Schneider with student at Le Wagon's Hiring Day

2) What were your expectations for the day and how did the day go?

Overall we had a very positive impression of the Hiring Day: The whole organisation before and during the event was very good. In particular, we would like to highlight the amazing atmosphere. It felt more like an open chat and relaxed get-together than a classic job fair. We really noticed their passion for IT topics, everyone was very open, knowledgeable and interested.

Our expectations towards the Hiring Day were to attract new talents for our teams, and we were not disappointed. The coding skills were not the most important factor for us since our focus was to find people who are having fun while coding and are interested in further development. For us it is important that the people enrich our teams personally with their different backgrounds - and we got to know a lot of them on the Hiring Day.

3) Why hire junior developers? How did the hiring process go after the Hiring Day?

The final decision for the two Alumni from Le Wagon was made together with the team and the candidates. Our process is not only designed to get to know the candidates’ technical know-how through interviews. Our process is a Trial Day which gives the candidates the opportunity to get to know the team, the company culture and the daily work-life.

For both sides, it felt like the perfect match. We are still super happy with the decision we made and are looking forward to the development as well as seeing their career develop which they started with us.

The cultural fit is as important to us as the skills that can be developed with our help at any time. So in the end, even though we had invited several candidates after the event, we decided to hire these two. For both sides, it felt like the perfect match. We are still super happy with the decision we made and are looking forward to the development as well as seeing their career develop which they started with us. :-)