This week is an exciting time in the life of our cohort and Rithm School as a whole. Our students are wrapping up their assigned work as developers for our company partnerships and transitioning into the next stage of the process: the outcomes, job-search portion. For the first time, Rithm School will be doing this work in-house and officially taking over the full cohort experience.
We’ve gradually built toward this path over the past six months by listening to prior experiences of Rithm alumni, taking into account industry-wide recruiting experiences and approaches, and also advising previous cohorts as they pursue new roles, interview processes, negotiations, and offers. Each of these conversations and experiences has provided us with a greater sense of how we can best equip our students to excel in their job search.
We’d like to give a quick high-level overview of what our approach to Outcomes will look like, mainly from a behavioral approach, and hopefully give you some insight into the work that we’re teeing up for the next three weeks.
The breakdown
The first breakdown is week-by-week, ultimately driving us to cover three main topics: Professional Presence, Screens (Phone and Technical), and Onsites, Offers, & Negotiations. We see these three topics as comprehensively addressing job related needs and questions for the group and also progressively building on one another to create a narrative for the students to follow along. In the next section, I’ll articulate some of our content which will help illustrate my point.
Establishing a Professional Presence
During week one, students will revisit the past five weeks’ Friday warmups that have brought exposure to the world of creating professional accounts, resume writing, networking basics, and developing an understanding and focus on companies to apply to. With much of the ground work already established, we’ll avoid wasting time getting hung up on jargon or the sheer difficulty of thinking about yourself, prior work experience, or the work completed during company projects. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that each student finds themselves equipped with tools and template documentation to assist the process of getting into an initial application or interview funnel.
Topics to cover:
- composing time management schedule,
- managing interview funnel & job tracking,
- discussing & quantifying work experience,
- resume crafting, finalization & review,
- creating and filling out professional networking and job sites/platforms,
- growing familiarity with job seeking platforms,
- outreach content, approaches & social networks,
- recruiting & reverse recruiting
- finally ending with a Q & A panel from prior Rithm alums who are currently working as full-time developers.
This work will go hand in hand with reviews on technical content previously learned (including OOP and Data Structures), along with how to talk through projects led during company contracting partnerships.
Screens, Phone and Technical
From here, we’ll shift into the second week of Outcomes which involves a deep dive into initial and technical phone screens. This will cover the experience of initial calls with internal and third-party recruiters, initial calls with hiring managers or engineers, technical screens where the use of a Google Doc, Zoom, or Coderpad doc is involved, and initial in-person whiteboarding screens. Throughout this week, the cohort will learn to differentiate the types of screens, ask clarifying questions to better know how to prepare for them, and learn several ways to help bolster their initial impression made during a screen.
Topics to cover:
- understanding screens & learning the process,
- learning from & reframing the role of recruiters,
- deeper dive into your vocational story,
- scripting responses & communication,
- mock screen role playing,
- tone & voice,
- recruiter outreach,
- making an impression known,
- affinity & identity groups,
- an offsite company visit and finally using space at the end of screens to gain information.
This work will go hand in hand with code alongs, white boarding practice, live coding experiences with our technical staff and lightning talk practice.
Onsites, Offers & Negotiations
In our final week, we’ll crescendo with an exploration of the final stages of interview processes. We’ll pack in the widest spectrum of content as we cover everything from presentation skills and confidence to bias, compensation negotiation, anchoring your value, and best practices in starting your first role as a Dev for long term career growth. (Feeling a ton of excitement around the discussions of this week!)
Topics to cover:
- presentations & assessments,
- understanding an onsite & greater interview context,
- managing stress & disappointment,
- revisiting time management,
- support systems,
- discussing bias,
- interview follow-ups,
- talking compensation & your “range”,
- negotiation tactics,
- leveraging interview processes,
- understanding company culture & potential “fit”,
- whiteboarding etiquette,
- long term growth,
- general continued resources & strategies,
- a celebration of all the hard work!
This work will go hand in hand with review of the above content, live coding and debugging, problem solving exercises and demos, direction on technical resources to continue to sharpen interview-readiness, and a technical instructor panel interview.
I don’t believe we can overstate how excited the staff is to be rolling out the first iteration of in-house Outcomes! It’s a great new chapter in the life of the community and an important move toward continuing to add value in the lives of our developers. We hope taking a moment to read this also encourages a sense of excitement about the next steps. If you’re interested in hearing more about Outcomes or if this piques your interest as a potential student, don’t hesitate to reach out to any of us here on staff. We’d love to chat!
Cheers!