Why Hire From Qwasar
How our learners make exceptional employees and why top-tier tech companies are headhunting our graduates.
8 Reasons to Recruit From Our Programs
Qwasar programs are wildly different from other programs out there. Our focus is on training skilled, competent developers ready for the workplace who love coding and have a strong technical foundation.
Having worked with employers and recruiters for years, specifically in technical talent recruitment, we find there are 8 major reasons why companies recruit from us on a consistent and recurring basis, all covered below but that include diversity, on-the-job readiness, real technical skill, creativity, resourcefulness, and the confident recruiters can have in accessing competent talent.
Confidence in Competency
Our students come from a vast variety of countries, time zones, backgrounds, professional experiences, ethnicities, cultures, religions, and more. Recruiters and managers generally look for competent candidates who are low risk and who can be a part of a team from Day 1. You want a candidate in whom you can have confidence: that they have the technical skills and competencies as well as “soft skills” to contribute in the role.
Qwasar programs are competency-based, which means:
- Learners develop specific skills and abilities to do things that a developer would do on the job
- They don’t progress to successive projects until they display competency of the one they’re on
- “Competency” is decided by entry-level job requirements and technical interview levels
As an employer, this means you can have:
- Consistency in competency among job candidates from Qwasar
- Confidence that graduates are able to perform on the job (i.e. they’re low risk)
Diverse Talent
Our students come from a vast variety of backgrounds, professional experiences, ethnicities, cultures, religions, and countries.
Students from all different backgrounds and countries make up our programs, bringing new perspectives and better input to our cohorts.
What brings us all together is code, power and value of diverse thinking. We take pride in our organization’s diversity as a black and women founded company as well as accepting students into our program from all over the world. Our learners bring diverse perspectives and experiences to the table to allow all of us a more well-rounded education. Thinking about problems in different ways has allowed students to understand different approaches and therefore be prepared for the real world.
Year-round Talent
Qwasar graduates are available year-round, not just in May or June. We have continuous cohorts of students completing our programs January to December. Our programs don’t follow the traditional academic calendar, meaning we can meet your recruitment needs no matter the time of year.
There is always new talent becoming available from our students and this can help plan your organizations pipeline.
Habituated to the Software Working World
Our learners are already situated to the working life of a software developer or engineer. Their week generally includes:
- Peer code reviews
- Pair programming
- Debugging their own code as well as that of others
- Daily standups
- Architecture or design discussions
- Daily standup reports at the end of the workday
- Working remotely, including in pairs/teams
Depth and Breadth of Technical Skills
Our learners develop a breadth and depth of technical skills and knowledge as they complete our programs. All learners complete a foundational track in C programming to ensure strong fundamentals in data structures and algorithms.
The manual element of C develops rigor, logic, and structure in learners’ thinking and in how they write code.
Additionally, learners specialize in their respective areas, gaining strong experience and competency with standard languages, concepts, tools, and frameworks.
They can generally pick up a new language within 2 weeks thanks to a foundational understanding in C.
Strong Software Development Experience
Learners at Qwasar write a LOT of code.
Depending on the program, they write anywhere from 30K to 100K lines of code in 5+ languages.
Towards the second half of their program, learners begin completing entire software projects from scratch, meaning that they have to:
- Translate project requirements into technical specifications
- Break down each project into smaller, key elements and divide up work when in a team
- Design a full architectural schema with diagrams
- Decide the logic, file structure, and functions they want to use
In completing 10+ full software projects, learners gain significant software development experience at increasingly difficult levels.
Determined, Resourceful Problem Solvers
Thanks to the nature of our programs and how learning happens, learners become resourceful problem solvers. They complete project after project, challenge after challenge, which they have to pass at standards that meet production-level requirements.
Without a professor to give them the right answer all the time, they have to learn how to be resourceful, as an engineer would on the job.
Faced with peer code reviews and code that needs to work, learners also learn to debug and to be determined when facing bugs and problems.
Job-ready and Wanting to Code From Day 1
Overall, our graduates are well-equipped to be successful in industry through projects, peer code reviews, coding collaboration, and coding standards. They are job-ready, passionate about their work, and set to contribute to your team and company from the first day on the job.
Everything about our programs are designed to prepare learners for success on the job, and to be great candidates.
Qwasarites on the Job: What to Expect From Our Learners as Employees
Our learners are well-rounded in all areas of their field and can be described as problem-solvers, resourceful, collaborators, and people who love coding. In more concrete terms, here’s what you should expect from learners as employees:
- Able to write quality code to a norm that’s readable and maintainable
- Able to give and receive peer code reviews
- Able to pair program and work with/on a team of engineers
- Resourceful when it comes to finding a solution
- Not afraid of tackling a new subject
- Able to learn a new language or tool quickly
- Able to learn on their own
- Able to actively contribute to discussions on software architecture
- At ease using Git and version control systems, including in group/team projects
- Ready to contribute to your engineering team from Day 1
How Learning Works
Qwasar programs are industry-learning, hands-on, and highly applied programs that don’t use pure knowledge transmission.
Learning at Qwasar is based on what happens in the real world on the job. As a developer, data scientist, or engineer, you will:
- Work on projects
- Collaborate with others
- Deliver production-ready code or work
- Give and receive peer code reviews
- Use an IDE, Git, and other industry tools
- Develop, test, and maintain a large code base
- Etc.
This is the essence of how learning works at Qwasar: learners work on projects, build software, collaborate with others, use an IDE and Git, and give and receive peer code reviews.
Recruiting with Us
- You can present your company to our cohorts through an informational session
- You can host a hackathon event for our students to become familiar with your organization
- Send us an engineer to do a live interview about what it is like to be an engineer at your company
- Have some engineers come and do peer reviews for our learners
- Group on-site/virtual visit (In the past, students have come on site to visit companies, if you have a virtual equivalent in the pandemic)
- If you are a startup, your founders/CTO could come present your product, company, code base (if appropriate) and what you’re building to our students
- Strategic Pipeline Planning and cohort-based recruitment
- Other – Got ideas? Let us know, we are open to suggestions!
