FairMate at TalentIT
22.10.2018
This is the story of how two young developers became Code-mates, turned a recurring problem into an opportunity to learn and grow, and used a new technology to build an app to help other students.
We think that student recruitment fairs, like TalentIT at Aalto Uni, are great opportunities to meet and greet a big group of young developers. Many of our employees got their first job in the software industry during their studies, and we want to provide the same kind of experience for the young talents out there!
Alessandro and Alex are the developers behind the FairMate application. Here’s the story how they found us and decided that we would be suitable.
During his studies Alex decided to apply for a job, but he had no idea where he’d like to work. He found us via search engines and after taking a look at our website he decided to apply and sent us his CV. Miika, our Helsinki sitemanager, liked Alex’s application and invited him at our office for a visit.
The first interview went very well and Miika saw that Alex had all the skills we look for in a young developer: motivation, development skills, interest in many technologies and ability to communicate with others.
We then gave him a small programming task and after a couple of weeks he sat down Roman, one of our Senior mobile developers, to discuss about the technical choices he made, his interests and future goals. We got a better view of his problem solving skills and he saw what we do in our everyday life and what we are looking for in a developer.
He’s been part of the Codemate team for one year and a half and is now a trusted mobile developer.
Alessandro was the first person to arrive at the Codemate booth in TalentIT 2017. At that time he was an exchange student looking for one more reason to remain in Finland other than his studies.
He arrived at the Codemate booth a bit before the event started and during the time we talked he showed great motivation towards programming and learning. Already then we felt that he is a person we’d like to work with, he also was thrilled about the idea of having us as his colleagues. So we decided to invite him for a visit at our office.
The TalentIT event ended at 5PM and Alessandro came there to thank us for the great chat we had earlier and to make sure he had understood correctly our invitation.
When Alessandro came to visit our office he kept making a good impression. Our employees were impressed about his motivation, way of thinking and personality – many thought they would like to work with him. He knew a lot about programming and seemed to be very confident: how many young developers would take the whiteboard over and start explaining theorems to older developers?
After the meeting at the office our recruiter had a short one-to-one chat with Alessandro before the official technical interview. We gave him a programing task, similar to the one Alex had, and this made us even more sure we wanted to work with him.
He’s now approaching his first year as part of the Codemate mobile development team.
This year we are again looking for young talents from student fairs. And now we have created a mobile application to help students track their impressions about the participating companies. The application is called FairMate for TalentIT. You can download it from App Store and Play Store
Despite Alessandro’s great interest in Codemate, the day after the fair he found himself with a pile of business cards from other companies but few memories whether he wanted to apply to some of them or not. He was not the only one in this situation, as many other students felt a bit lost in front of the big amount of opportunities in front of them.
So he started thinking and came up with a simple but powerful solution: an app to keep track of the companies he visited and the feedbacks he got from them. Later, when he already worked at Codemate, we started to plan for the TalentIT 2018 event. Alessandro brought up his app idea and the app was taken into production. We decided to use Flutter, a new great technology powered by Google to build multi-platform apps in a familiar and friendly way.
With FairMate for TalentIT 2018 application we want to encourage young talents to go after their dream jobs! FairMate is made in cooperation with Aalto University as we all want to make the fair experience even better than before. With the app you get to track your impression about the companies and keep notes of those 100+ participating companies.