How do we hire using the bootcamp. Experience of the department of search interfaces

Hiring is hard. Hiring a lot of people a month is even more difficult.

For a company, hiring is difficult because it has to compete with other companies that provide similar and sometimes better conditions. You need to be able to stand out with something, provide opportunities that others do not have.

For a person, a job change is, as a rule, an additional psychological burden: new tasks, new colleagues, a new route of commuting to work. And when hiring Yandex, it also adds a difficult choice of the team in which to work. We always have offers from several teams, and the applicant needs to choose which team to go to in a short time of interviewing and receiving a job offer.

Our department of search interfaces and services for organizations is constantly looking for developers and competes for their attention not only with other companies, but also with other departments in Yandex. There are many different directions in the department itself and a large selection of projects and tasks to be solved. We hire several people per month.

We have those who are well able to conduct interviews. But when the vacancy in the team is closed, the interviewer with extensive experience does not need to continue to do this until he has a new vacancy in the team.

Putting it all together and thinking well, we decided to hire a department through the bootcamp. In this case, we kill several birds with one stone at once:

• A new person goes to a department not immediately into some specific team, but into a separate group for three months, in which there is an opportunity to try the tasks of all the teams in the department. This allows you to look around and make a decision, to understand what you like more.
• teams have the opportunity to decide whether they want to and can work with this person. From interviews it is not always possible to understand the views on the development. And having done the tasks together, it immediately becomes clear whether it is worth going further along.
• general information we tell beginners not to everyone individually, but to everyone together at once.
• and those who are able to interview well, do not cease to do this with the closure of their vacancies, since there are always open vacancies in the department.

There are department groups in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Minsk, Innopolis and Simferopol. We hire in all cities - respectively, and the bootcamp passes in all cities. When hiring from other cities we help to move to any city from the list above.

We collect tasks in the bootcamp from all teams. They should not be very difficult, but with good learning potential. We impose restrictions: in 2.5 months you need to do at least ten tasks, no more than five tasks in one project and at least three in different projects.

This means that during this time it will be necessary to deploy working copies of various projects, understand their structure, build, understand and accomplish the tasks themselves, conduct them through review, testing and roll out into production.

Each task in the bootcamp has one who can answer questions about it, do a review of the code and accept the result.

And each bootcamp also has a mentor who can be approached with questions when nothing is clear at all. He also helps with the selection of tasks for the internship period and makes the final decision at the end whether the person has passed a trial period or not. But at the same time, he does not spend all his time helping the bootcamper, the main points of intersection for the tasks at the bootcamper are still with the owners of the tasks.

It is important that the mentor and bootcamp are in the same city.

At the time of the bootcamp there is no certain fixed workplace. We think it is better to sit with the team whose tasks are now at work. Communicating with this team, going to dinner together - all this allows you to work together and make a choice.

For interviews, we organized weekly duty. There is a separate queue for primary remote Skype interviews, viewing resumes and test tasks. And separate queues in each city for face-to-face interviews. This allows you to balance the load on the interviewees and not much to tear them from the main work.

We hire all the interface developers of the department, except for interns and senior developers, via the bootcamp. Interns and so work in teams and require greater attention. In most cases, a team in which a person has completed an internship already knows his capabilities and understands whether he is ready to work with him further. The senior developer, on the contrary, as a rule, already knows what he wants. And we know which team he will do the most good. You can make a choice without passing the bootcamp.

We are still at the very beginning of the organization of this process, and for sure there will be corrections and additions along the way. But we still like what happens, and ideally we want to organize hiring through the bootcamp, not only in our department, but throughout Yandex.