
Launch HN: Hatchways (YC S19) – Internships Instead of Interviews - jaclynmling
Hi HN,<p>My name is Jaclyn Ling and I&#x27;m the co-founder&#x2F;CEO of Hatchways (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hatchways.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hatchways.io</a>). We make it easier to get your first job.<p>More specifically, we help talented engineers who may not shine in traditional recruitment processes (resume + multiple interview processes) get opportunities to prove themselves on the job. We do this by using a practical skill-based assessment as a proxy for the resume, and then matching them to startups for paid internships, as a way to reduce full-time interview processes.<p>As a new grad without relevant work experience, or as a career shifter without a relevant degree, getting a first job is very painful. You spend months preparing for interviews that don’t reflect the job, you send hundreds of resumes out that go unanswered, and when you actually get interviews, getting through five rounds successfully is like a lottery.<p>I’ve been interested in this problem for a long time because of my own early struggles trying to get a job. I graduated from a foreign university (Canada), had a subpar GPA, and I don’t perform well in high-pressured style interviews. Somehow, I networked my way into getting interviews at all my “dream” companies. But I got rejected at every one of them and to this day, I’ve never gotten a job I’ve interviewed for. It deeply affected my confidence.<p>However, since then I was fortunate enough to start and exit a startup. We built a fashion app that made personal outfit recommendations based on your likes, which eventually evolved into a chatbot that provided recommendations to hundreds of thousands of teens. We got acquired, and when I was working for the company that acquired us, I finally realized that the interviews I&#x27;d failed at hadn’t reflected my ability to do well on the job.<p>Mainstream hiring processes are biased towards those who went to great schools, had high GPAs, are native-English speaking, have worked at brand name companies, are extroverts and great networkers, etc. But there are so many talented people who don&#x27;t fit that profile. We&#x27;re excited to work on ways of hiring that give them a better chance.<p>Our practical skill-based assessments simulate tasks they’d actually be doing on the job (e.g. project-based work). Engineers on our end review the job seeker’s code to pick up signals that are important for on-the-job such as: ability to follow a spec, code quality and how quickly the task is completed. An employer pays 90% of the cost only when a full-time hire is made, so ensuring that candidates have job-ready skills is crucial for us. We&#x27;ve found that it works to give people the opportunity to prove themselves on the job: 80% of our internships have resulted in full-time employment immediately after.<p>So far, we have helped talented engineers get software jobs who would have otherwise been overlooked: baristas and Uber drivers turned engineers, candidates with no local experience (from Turkey, India, Russia, Ethiopia, Brazil etc.), and those with non-CS degrees (linguistics, philosophy, economics, MBA’s, dentistry, mechanical engineering etc.)<p>I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas about how we can improve this system and how we can best help talented people who shine once they get a chance to prove themselves. We would love to hear your personal experiences in this space too. Thank you!
======
napsterbr
I seriously hope you folks succeed. All the luck to you! Here's my non-
traditional story:

I've worked on my own personal projects for 10 years, always looking for new
challenges. I've dropped out of college after 2 years since it was crystal
clear to me that I learned _much_ more when working on my own stuff. I would
learn new things in college, but at a much slower pace. I guess it was useful
to learn calculus...

Anyway. Financially I never needed a fully paying job, so I could spend all my
time doing my own research. From web security to docker to bsd to aws/gcp,
I've managed to gather a lot of personal experience on many tools. Similarly,
I went from PHP to Erlang to Haskell and back. For a brief period I even
managed my own team!

But now, 10 years later, I just started looking for my first job and boy, do I
realize my resume is empty! I have some code on github but none of my projects
are famous or noteworthy. So far, most jobs I've applied for said I'm not
qualified, and I don't blame them if all they looked at was my CV.

To solve this I'm working on (yet another) project, a distributed KV storage
with built-in MQ capabilities, automatic clustering and transparent sharding,
eventual consistency through the use of operation-based crdts, written in my
favorite language for distributed systems (Elixir). Hopefully I can use it to
get a job, but I think proving one's experience and knowledge should be
easier.

Interestingly, if I had gotten a job when I dropped out (~6 years ago), I
would probably be a specialist/senior engineer on some specific tool, but I
wouldn't have the range of experience I do today.

Sorry if I digress, just wanted to share my non-traditional "case" (to be
fair, you asked for it!)

~~~
hermitdev
In my experience, you don't need to be a major contributor to an open source
project to gain notice. I've only 3-5 minor contributions (work rules
generally preclude me from being more active)

While my contributions haven't been large in terms of LOC, nor have I added
new features, I have identified, debugged and supplied patches for bugs.

I mean, I did this out of self interest, of course.

A defect in a certain DB lib on bulk copying with nulls would fail
(uninitialized memory in the C portion of the lib). That took about 6 weeks of
on again/off again attention. Debugging a C module in Python is a bit of a
pain in the ass.

Fixing 64-bit compatibility in a Windows ODBC C++ wrapper was another. This
was a pain because it required a line by line audit to make sure the correct
types were used on every ODBC call.

A problem with some inline assembly using rtdsc as a highres timer reporting
200 years had elapsed in a few minutes. This took a long while to figure out
and only stumbled into the cause of the bug. I was using the timer to measure
socket timeouts. We were supposed to timeout after 30 seconds, but randomly,
the timeout would trigger immediately. Stumbled into it because we were using
the same timer to measure database queries. Found it odd that my logs were
reporting queries were taking more than 200 years to complete, as I sat there
reading the logs and seeing them complete.

Another was an issue of file handles being, no pun intended, mishandled on a
.Net logging lib. I forget the details on this one. Dont think the file was
being properly closed at exit?

Reported an issue with Boost DateTime overflowing on certain arithmetic
situations. Coworker found the issue, but I narrowed down the issue, figured
out a solution and reported upstream. Finding the wrong typeset in a template
zoo like Boost is an arduous task.

I'm sure there's more I've forgotten, but my contributions haven't been much
in the way of LOC. My contributions have been in the hours spent and expertise
in finding the typically 1 or 2 lines that are wrong.

Having experience like that on a resume (and being able to talk knowledgeably
about what you did and how you do it) do open doors. Having "found and fixed
obscure bug" in a widely used OSS lib is nearly just as valuable as churning
out lots of OSS code. Probably more noticeable if you fix bugs in an OSS
project that lots of people/companies use, rather than churning out tons of
lines in a project almost no one has heard of or uses (beyond the authors).

Edit: spelling

Addendum: providing bug fixes for 3rd party libs also demonstrates an ability
to work with and understand code written by someone else, which is a valuable
skill in of itself.

~~~
xiphias2
I would add one more thing: if you contribute patches to an OSS, you are
already working with people who can help you find a job and skip the HR part.

------
d0paware
I recommend time-boxing how much time candidates will have to spend on your
process. People coming from an alternate career path still have to pay their
bills through their current job and tend to the same responsibilities as
anyone else. Asking them to do days of unpaid homework
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16874015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16874015))
may not be a luxury they can afford.

For the take-home portion of your assessment, consider paying the candidates
for their time at an entry-level annualized salary. Many companies would balk
at this idea because it is more expensive, but it demonstrates respect for the
candidate.

Looking at the website, I don't see many details about what the assessment
actually includes. I think it would help to be forthright about the structure
of the assessment. Does Hatchways or the employer determine what the
assignment is? How does one create a rubric for scoring a submission, and how
is quality assurance conducted on the effectiveness of these rubrics?

I think it is only fair to tell candidates what area of expertise they are
going to be tested on a week ahead of time, so they can prepare as they see
fit. As for this bit: "ability to follow a spec, code quality and how quickly
the task is completed" \- it would make sense that different companies would
place different weights on each of these factors, given that some of these
parameters can often be at odds with each other.

Also - a particularly tricky area: how do you give feedback to candidates? Do
you help them succeed? Is it enough that Hatchways gives the feedback, and not
the employer to avoid lawsuits? Having done some take-homes in the past that
were rejected, I received absolutely no feedback on what could have been done
better or what was missing. Candidates who continually to struggle and don't
pass any of the interviews aren't necessarily morons or inept - they just need
someone to point them in the right direction.

~~~
jaclynmling
Great points and comments here. Few things to add: -one big benefit for our
candidates doing our take-home project is that they only need to do one
assessment that can they qualify them for dozens of companies. Rather than
have to do 5-6 different take-homes for different employers. -Before a
candidate begins an assessment we are very upfront with what knowledge and
skills you will need before you start. If there is any way we can make this
clearer, we'd definitely be open to feedback -At the moment, it is quite
manual how we match employers to the right candidates (we usually do this by
fully understanding what the candidate will be doing on the job and helping
them prioritize the right skills based on that) -We try our best to give
feedback to every candidate that comes on to our platform- regardless if they
make it through the assessment or not. In particular, candidates who do
interviews with employers we are very active with asking employers for
feedback on a candidates interview performance so we can deliver more candid
feedback than they could give.

Very much agree that candidates these days are not receiving candid feedback
that they can action on after they interview with employers, and this is a
whole other issue that needs to be solved.

------
koopuluri
Hey Jaclyn, glad to hear you're tackling this space - one that I'm passionate
about. Congrats on the launch!

"As a new grad without relevant work experience, or as a career shifter
without a relevant degree, getting a first job is very painful" \- Absolutely
true.

I've spent a good chunk of the past few months mentoring a cousin to help him
get his first job in Tech. He studied computer science, has a great GPA, can
actually build stuff, but went to a not so well known college in California
and didn't have any top tech company internships under his belt.

Very few companies responded to his applications (< 1% positive response) and
he really had to hustle his way to get noticed (cold emails, milking his and
my personal network for introductions to engineering managers, etc).

Companies like TripleByte seem to have shifted more towards the senior
software engineer category, so I see tremendous value in targeting entry-level
positions.

Questions: How do you plan to effectively source candidates that are able to
pass your assessment? I think an interesting starting point would be to work
with graduates of not well-known computer science programs. I think people
generally under-estimate the difficulty of getting foot in the door at reputed
Tech companies, when you didn't study at a top 10 CS program, and they would
probably be the closest group, on average, to passing your technical
assessment.

In my conversations with fast-growing companies in the Bay, I got the sense
that the demand for senior software engineers far outstrips demand for entry-
level / internship positions. Have you noticed the same trend, and as a result
are you working mostly with already established larger companies?

Congrats again. Always happy to see more people tackle this problem. We need
to create a more accessible, meritocratic pathway to work in Tech.

~~~
jaclynmling
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!

~~~
koopuluri
> 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.

~~~
jaclynmling
Great ideas-- never thought about virtual career fairs, but that sounds very
interesting.

You're definitely right that undervalued AND entry-level candidates is a hard
sell most of the time-- but more employers need to start giving out work
experience rather than just expecting 2-3 years+ work experience. So hopefully
we can find more unique ways to help solve this "experience gap" problem as we
grow.

------
jedberg
This looks like a great way to help people without a traditional background, I
love it!

One question: Do you help employers pick an appropriate salary that is not
abusive but reflects the candidates lack of experience? I ask because I myself
hired a career transitioner and I had no idea what a fair wage was to pay her,
and neither did she. We eventually settled on a number that worked for me and
her, but I still have no idea if it's fair.

~~~
jaclynmling
We do help employers gage appropriate salaries. We place candidates into tier
levels based on a.) how well they did on our online assessment and b.) if they
have any relevant work experience-- the tier levels relate to salaries that
would be appropriate. This also allows employers and candidates to have the
right expectations before walking into interviews.

------
jasonpeacock
I always thought the tech industry would benefit from probationary
hiring/apprenticeships to help counter the challenges in technical
interviewing - basically this same approach as internships but for experienced
professionals.

Would you expand your program to include those experienced in the industry who
don't (or won't) perform well in traditional tech interviews?

~~~
jaclynmling
We believe that trial employment at any level is effective and beneficial to
both sides. For candidates it allows them to get a better feel of the work
before committing, and for employers, you get a better sense of the person's
skill level in your environment. We personally have hired senior engineers
doing part-time trials, and this has been effective for us. This is something
we could possibly expand into in the future.

------
sandGorgon
I really wish you all the best. A large part of our team at RedCarpet was
hired this way. The biggest thing that it helped was to not depend on
signalling from the big name universities in India (the IIT, etc).

We are proud that we did this and is now part of our company culture. The
internship program is core to our people ops and everyone in the company
participates.

We call it the ROCKS program -
[https://www.redcarpetup.com/rocks/](https://www.redcarpetup.com/rocks/)

Today our success rate is 100% placement - either at RedCarpet or other
startups in India. From what i hear, our internship program is now used as
signalling by others (without depending on college name branding)

Joke : we internally describe the ROCKS program as " _its like Lambda School,
except people get paid to learn and get a job_ ". Feel free to steal that ;)

~~~
jaclynmling
Appreciate your comment! Will look more in-depth and perhaps reach out in the
near future to pick your brain further (probably after the yc demo day rush
though :P)

Great website and mission. Wishing you all the best too!

------
kaywu
This is great - what you guys are doing particularly hits home for me.

I graduated out of UC Riverside, with a degree in Accounting, and if any of
you are Asian-American in California, you'd know it's infamous nickname:
University of Chinese Rejects. I'm willing to bet that my GPA was even lower
than yours Jaclyn.

I managed to finagle my way into a UX/UI position at a major consulting firm
and before that STRUGGLED to get nearly anybody to take me seriously. There's
a lot of parallels to draw with Design to Engineering, most employers there
are already making hiring decisions based on portfolio and aptitude, rather
than grades. But still, the same platitudes of: great undergrad/masters, brand
name companies, extroverts, etc all ring true. You're often focused on gaming
the interview process and saying the right things, rather than being assessed
as a measurement of your actual work output.

Anyway, the only way I got noticed was doing what you guys are offering as a
much more legitimized service. I had to create major projects for myself that
would demonstrate I had some literacy in how work would actually be done in
the field, cold email + network with a bunch of companies just to get a foot
in the door, create a portfolio without any help.

I think I'm one of the few that got extremely lucky in the end, but it really
warms my heart that you guys are providing a service that really formalizes
the career shifting process. I'll be rooting for your guys' success.

~~~
jaclynmling
Thanks for sharing your story. Glad to hear you were able to overcome the
traditional barriers. Great idea to explore design as an industry we can
expand into in the future!

------
abhshkdz
This seems to have tremendous potential. I like the conscious effort to de-
bias the system away from initial indicators (like school, GPA, etc.). Thank
you for doing this!

Question -- is there the possibility of an income-share model here? i.e.
Hatchways does due diligence in initial assessment + matching and even pays
for the candidate's internship at the company, and makes money only when the
candidate gets a full-time offer as a pre-agreed upon percentage of the
candidate's salary (for the first N months say).

~~~
jaclynmling
We definitely think there is a huge value add to do an ISA after an
internship-- which can further show our conviction of our candidates to
employers if we are willing to up-front salaries.

We have in the past been able to receive government funding for some
candidates that proved really positive for both candidates (received
opportunities that they may otherwise not have had) and employers (to take
more chances)

------
jasonwen
Thanks for starting this Jaclyn.

I come from a non-traditional background. More than 10 years ago I started a
niche community that grew at its height over 1.5M/monthly visitors. Everything
custom built in PHP.

Then I co-founded a SaaS analytics service which we ran for 5 years.

In 2017 I started a solo project while learning Node.js, Vue.js, Postgres,
microservices, to keep myself updated.

I decided that I wanted to join a team after going solo for a while and to
progress my professional career. However having no CS degrees I lack
foundational programming skills. I only know the stuff that I come in contact
with so during interviews, sometimes I can't answer seemingly basic
programming questions. I always focused on implementation and having limited
time, didn't look for the why.

I'm falling between junior and senior experience and I feel companies have no
clue what to do with me.

At the moment I'm learning advanced JS concepts, programming paradigms, data
structures and algorithms, and plan to open source a project that shows all
that. Showing my portfolio with projects is not enough for the roles I'm
looking for.

I probably lack interviewing skills. So thanks for creating hatchways, I might
use it in the future. From a hiring perspective, hiring full time based on a
couple interviews is super risky. I actually like to work freelance/intern
before committing myself - culture works in both ways. This is obviously a
privileged position if you have time or money.

I like the idea of the hiring manager/interviewer being more of a coach during
the process, and tailoring the process towards different
personalities/situations.

------
rll163
Hey Jaclyn -

I think this is amazing! I'm all for challenging the existing recruiting
status quo! I personally found it extremely difficult to pivot out of one
industry and trying to break into another. I went through the standard process
of getting a degree, doing internships, maintaining GPA, and receiving an
offer upon graduation. When I graduated, my target industry essentially
cratered, my offer was rescinded, and I was a bit lost. After some
research/self-prep, I decided that the tech sector was where I wanted to be.
After doing a temp stint in IT admin, some MOOC’s, and personal side-projects,
I still found it extremely challenging to pivot into. I didn’t know what else
to do other than to go back to school and basically go through the exact same
funnel as before, which is what I ended up doing. This isn’t a feasible option
for a lot of people and I think one (of many) ways your platform provides
value is accessibility.

That being said, I had a few questions from both a candidate’s and employer’s
perspective:

\- How does Hatchaways compete with the timelines of the conventional
recruiting method (i.e. ~1-2 months vs your model of interning)?

\- If a candidate realizes that the opportunity may not be a good fit (from
his/her side), will Hatchaways connect them with another prospective employer
for another Hatchaways recruiting cycle (i.e. internship) once the first one
is complete?

\- How does Hatchaways enable employers to assess multiple candidates for the
same position at once?

\- Is there a penalty to employers if business needs change halfway through
the assessment (i.e. the job that the candidate is being assessed for no
longer exists)?

\- How are employers affected when a candidate begins an internship part of
the way, only to get a full time job at another company?

Would love to chat more about this and I’m really excited to see where you
take this!

Best R

~~~
jaclynmling
I was really touched to read your story. Thank you for sharing your
challenges, and particularly around how you felt the only other option was to
go back to school just to get the opportunities one would get by being a
'student'.

Here are answers to your questions:

-Most of our candidates will receive an offer in less than a week since we are able to shorten the interview cycle

-Yes definitely-- if a candidate doesn't like where they interned at, they are always welcome to come back on to our platform to get matched with more employers for a new internship

-We usually match employers with 2-4 candidates we think suit what they are looking for. We get them to interview them back to back (similar to the Waterloo co-op system) so they can evaluate and interview fairly, as well as make a decision quickly (hopefully by the end of that day)

-There is a penalty if an employer provides an offer to a candidate and in between the time they make an offer and the start date-- they pay half of the entire internship salary to the candidate

-Good last question-- this has not happened yet with us. Most employers are actually quite open and let our candidates know that they are allowed to interview and even accept other offers. I believe that most employers at the end of the day only want to hire candidates who want to be work for them, so if they are curious about other companies and want to take another offer, it probably wasn't a good fit to start with!

Thanks so much for your feedback, would love to answer any more questions you
might have!

~~~
rll163
Thanks for the quick reply. Had a few more questions, out of curiosity!

\- Does Hatchaways provide support to candidates with regards to salary
negotiations? A common method is to have multiple competing offer and it may
be difficult for candidates to go through conventional interviews when they
are going through the more immersive Hatchaway cycle.

\- Does Hatchaways provide health insurance to candidates while they are in
the 'internship-phase' of the recruitment process to full time?

\-- R

~~~
jaclynmling
\- we generally give an average salary to expect depending on your skill
level/ experience level, so both the candidate and employer going in with a
similar expectation.

-at this time we don't offer health insurance but some of our companies still do during the 'trial phase'. It's something worth thinking about for the future though, thanks!

------
napoleond
As someone who has been a non-traditional candidate in the past, and also
leveraged non-traditional candidates as an employer, this is amazing. Thank
you for doing it! I would have used this myself in the past, and I'm confident
that both sides of your market will find _huge_ value in this!

~~~
jaclynmling
Really appreciate that you, as a non-traditional candidate, promote non-
traditional hiring now that you are an employer!

------
bankisan
This is such a great idea! Thank for you doing this :)

I also came into tech from a non-traditional background and I struggled at the
beginning to get my foot in the door. I studied math and econ in school, and
even though my passion was writing software, it was hard to start applying
without any projects or connections in the field.

To find a job, I spent money on a coding bootcamp post-graduation from
college. This seemed like the only option at the time. If there was something
like this at the time, I would have rather have gone that route instead.

~~~
jaclynmling
Thanks for sharing your story. I hope your career transition has been
rewarding since!

------
rukugu
"Mainstream hiring processes are biased towards those who went to great
schools, had high GPAs, are native-English speaking, have worked at brand name
companies, are extroverts and great networkers, etc. But there are so many
talented people who don't fit that profile. We're excited to work on ways of
hiring that give them a better chance." This really struck a chord. All the
best!

------
hysan
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.

~~~
jaclynmling
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.

~~~
hysan
Thank you for the quick reply!

------
smoll
This is really great, and I wish this existed 6+ years ago while I was
transitioning careers. I graduated from a "name brand" university with a Stats
degree, but no relevant work experience, and no desire to pursue what most of
my classmates were doing (actuarial exams, etc.)

I liked assembling computer hardware when I was younger so I ended up getting
my A+ certification and started working in IT help desk, eventually doing more
sysadmin work, but still felt pretty unfulfilled. I couldn't afford to take
the time off a full-time job to do a bootcamp or something similar, and almost
took a combined work/training gig (which would have been something like a 60%
pay-cut for 2 years -- in retrospect, this was totally exploitative and a
terrible offer, so I was right to be reluctant).

I told my then employer about the offer and leveraged it into a lateral move
into their QA dept. After doing the job for a bit and learning the basics, I
read online that people were automating the checks I was performing manually.
I started spending as much time as I could (and several months of extremely
late nights) learning how to code. Once I knew enough Ruby to be dangerous, it
was a gateway to new and better offers until I found myself doing regular old
Software Engineering. I was lucky to be given some great opportunities and
tenacious enough to lateral my way into the career I wanted (at past jobs I
would spend a chunk of my time unsanctioned working on various software
problems that the company had, only to turn around and say "look what I built,
could you give me a job doing this full-time?") but had I not already been in
a field where I was working with developers and with computers every day, it
would have been 10x harder to make the lateral moves that I did.

Anyway, that's my nontrad story. I think the best time for me to have joined a
program like this would have been at the moment where I was doing lots of
webdev side-projects but no "real life" problem to solve using the theoretical
skills I had gained. It worked out for me in the end, but something like this
could have definitely made my circuitous path a lot more straightforward.

------
0az
This is wonderful. Hopefully, I won't need to engage in as many of the
obligatory endless internship applications.

Here's a some papercuts I found: some of the longer input field labels flow
into the input text on my Moto G5 ("Explain a barrier...", etc.) as do some
longer placeholders, and the save notification banners close fits neatly under
the chat button. In addition, it took me a moment to parse the education
section of skills: it isn't immediately obvious what a current student should
put in the fields. It should also be possible to save filled fields in profile
despite not filling out all mandatory fields.

------
Riphyak
Love this idea: closing the experience gap which makes it ridiculously hard
for many talented graduates to land at their first job.

You should beware of MacDonalds and Starbucks though as soon as they start
feel feel shortages ;).

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raghava
More power to you and your kind!

I have been trying this model in India, along with a few of my friends/peers -
to hire for junior/intermediate roles and found a great deal of success.

Experience and capability, in a way could be seen as having parts - [ ~30-40%
{generic tech, domain, soft-skills}, ~70-60%{contextual knowledge and
experience on the product/stack/domain} ]

The former comes from past work experience; the latter part - which is more
crucial to achieve successful outcomes from intended role, is gained only on
the job.

And thus IMO internship/apprenticeship model works really well.

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ghiculescu
Looks great. Signed up as an employer. I couldn’t see it on the site on
mobile, but is there any info on pricing or locations covered? (I’m in
Chicago)

(And bu signed up I mean I followed the “contact us” CTA)

~~~
jaclynmling
Thanks for signing up! We're still working on the dashboard side for employers
so I'll be contacting you shortly to set up a meeting to share more.

High level-- we're trying to appeal to startups so our fees are much more
accessible than traditional agency/recruiting fees!

------
ctchocula
Your story really resonated with me, because of how similar it is to my own. I
also graduated from Canada with a subpar gpa, and struggled a lot finding
employment. In the end doing grad school in the US is what opened many doors
into the tech industry for me, but I wish I hadn't wasted so many years
looking for jobs between undergrad and grad school. I think your startup will
do a lot of good in the world. Best of luck!

~~~
jaclynmling
Thank you for sharing and it sucks that you feel you 'wasted' years. I'm glad
you found your way into tech and wishing you the best as well :)

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phantom_oracle
I don't mean to be critical of the other startups coming out of YC 2019, but
some of the problems they are solving are so niche that they don't even
register beyond metropolitan cities like San Francisco.

This is a difficult problem to solve because we've heard 100s of times about
how hiring is broken.

The problem also scales beyond software engineering jobs because shitty hiring
processes exist across most industries.

I hope you guys succeed, just so that you can show the world that hiring
doesn't need to be the shitty (and sometimes elitist) process it has become.

~~~
jaclynmling
Thank you for this.

It's a very difficult problem to solve because many employers are stuck in
their own ways and going to go to big /enterprise companies and telling them
they can't look at resumes if they work with us is usually an easy no for
them. But we're hoping that if more and more startups work with us and if we
can prove that this model is more effective for growing tech startups than
hopefully, the big guys will latch on too.

------
quickthrower2
I love this idea. I struggled to get my first job because there seemed to be a
"people skills" craze at the time which meant that my coding skills were being
less valued by companies. I felt like I was interviewing to be an actor in
some of them. So I like the idea of perfecting interviewing to select on what
is really required.

1\. How do you compare to Codility which also does the same kind of thing?

2\. How do you convince companies to take on interns?

~~~
jaclynmling
Great questions.

1\. Codility (to my knowledge) skews more short coding challenges, whereas
ours are more practical project-based assessments. We're trying to assess "can
you build" versus testing computer science concepts 2\. A few things have
worked for us. One big thing is to position our candidates as fully capable of
receiving full-time offers, but that if they move quicker (via one interview
then an internship offer) you can sign with them quicker than they would
finish up their full-time interviews, or else they may miss out on great
talent. The other, is this "try before you buy" mentality around lowering the
risk for full-time hiring. They already do it with students, why can't they do
it with non-students?

------
andy_ppp
I would much rather do a day of work than jump through abstract technical
tests and non real problems.

You could add a point for each of:

1) quick setup

2) selected a bug and started working on it

3) wrote a test or two

4) solved the bug

Extra points:

5) made the codebase better

6) asked questions

7) etc.

------
Pete-Codes
Hey Jaclyn I launched a website for bootcamp and self-taught coders last week:
[https://www.nocsdegree.com](https://www.nocsdegree.com)

It was top here for a few hours last Tuesday
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20506945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20506945)

So maybe we could team up some way :)

~~~
jaclynmling
Hey Pete this is great! Thanks for sharing. I'll reach out. Would be awesome
if there was some way to help each other :)

~~~
Pete-Codes
Ooops! Didn't see this. My email is pete@nocsdegree.com :)

------
ok1a
Hello Jaclyn!

Hatchways sounds awesome. I hope you don't mind, but I sent you a message on
LinkedIn regarding utilizing Hatchways. I could not PM you on here and my
question revolves around a story that I would prefer to be kept private. Huge
shoutout to everyone posting their non-traditional stories in this thread, by
the way!

I hope to hear back from you, Thanks, and keep doing great!

~~~
jaclynmling
Thank you for your note on LinkedIn. I hope one day you'll come back and share
your non-traditional story as well!

------
marshmellman
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.

~~~
jaclynmling
I do think there is huge value in internship/ trial employment at all levels.
We've personally hired a senior engineer this way-- she was working full-time
and trialed with us for a few hours a week so she could get a better sense of
our environment and team, while we could also assess her skills and fit. It
worked out great, and hope more employers/candidates can view this process as
a mutually beneficial vetting process.

------
simonebrunozzi
Hey Jaclyn, congrats on launching this - I think it's a wonderful idea.

Are you based in Canada / Toronto? I'd be happy to meet you and give you some
suggestions based on my experience, if you visit the Bay area. My email is my
HN username at gmail.

------
codetrotter
If someone from a foreign country, say Norway, contacts you about wanting your
help to get a job, do you also help those candidates through the process of
getting a green card?

If so, awesome! If not, that’s an idea for possible improvement right there :)

~~~
jaclynmling
This is great point! At this time unfortunately, we don't have the capacity to
make that happen, but we are looking into partnerships to help make that
possible for foreign workers

------
jarfa
This is cool, and might be useful to a friend of mine with a non-traditional
background. But your company's blog is very focused on Toronto - do you all
have relationships with NYC companies?

~~~
jaclynmling
We initially launched this in Toronto and have recently expanded into major US
cities like SF and NYC

------
pnathan
Hi, I wish you the best of luck. The market skews so hard to seniors, and
certain locations prioritize certain schools, it's really amazing.

I hope you expand into Seattle soon.

------
amingilani
This is wonderful! Do you match with employers that offer visas to potential
migrants? I feel like not enough platforms focus on this.

~~~
jaclynmling
In some cases employers we work with are very open to offering visas for
potential migrants, but because we mainly focus on startups at the moment this
isn't super common (yet!)

------
null_pointer_yc
Finally someone is going to solve one of the major problems of IT matket! Good
luck, I'm sure you'll succeed in that!

------
avip
How do you onboard ladies (companies)? This seems like potentially one-sided
market.

~~~
jaclynmling
Right now we mainly onboard employers manually, and hoping to create the other
side of the market in the near future.

------
slvrspoon
I think this is good and would be interested in trying some hiring via you.

~~~
jaclynmling
That's great to hear - send us a message at hello@hatchways.io and we can set
up next steps

------
zenobiaAP
I would like to point out that many people give online assessment tests in
groups (cheating). Each person solves one question for the interviewee. That
is how most people get jobs. So, assessment tests should be conducted onsite
and not online (If possible).

~~~
jaclynmling
Yep definitely a fair point. Our assessments are building out full projects
(so it's less easy to share answers/ get one person to do one question and
another person to do another).

Secondly, we do meet each candidate for a 1-hour virtual call as well just to
ensure their skills in person align with those online!

We just know candidates are more comfortable completing assessments in their
own environment (which is what they would be doing on the job anyway) so we
don't want to dock out points for people who get anxiety for onsite tests.

------
Pete-Codes
Looks good - glad interns are getting paid!!

------
Advaith
I love it! Skin in the game.

------
Beefin
love the website design! adding it to my "Webspiration" folder.

~~~
jaclynmling
Thank you :)

------
dlphn___xyz
if a candidate didnt get through the traditional method (including multiple
interviews and code assessments) then maybe they're just not the right fit for
that specific job...why prolong the process even further?

~~~
andylee024
Hatchways thesis is that the traditional method (multiple interviews and code
assessments) sucks for screening talent.

Here's an analogy. The current method is like qualifying for a marathon by
having candidates run a 100m sprint. A better method is using a half-marathon
as the qualifying test. Great marathon runners will probably pass both the
100m sprint and half-marathon tests. That said, some pretty good runners will
fail the 100m sprint but pass the half-marathon test with flying colors.

Hatchways is changing the qualifying criteria from 100m sprint to a half-
marathon so more people can qualify for the race!

~~~
jaclynmling
Love this analogy. Everyone showcases their skills in different ways, and we
definitely want to help more people shine in whatever run they perform best
in.

