Guarantees of work

[rub1e]

Couple of A few things:

• You say you'll take responsibility for finding perm work for those who don't want to freelance. Are you undertaking to guarantee either freelance work or perm work for every single FAC grad who wants it? (Not saying dream job, but a job?)
• You say you can only guarantee freelance work for the first four months. If someone goes through those four months and there's not enough freelance work to go round, will you continue to support them into perm employment?
• In the unlikely event that in a given cohort all 16 students want to freelance, will you guarantee four months of freelance income for all of them, or will you be selective?
• Will you guarantee to use your recruitment processes to at least look for work for older FAC alumni who are on second/third jobs? (i.e. are we still expecting alums to start their job searches through us?)

[rub1e]

Another one:

• Let's be blunt here: what if even after four months of your support and mentoring, someone's still... a bit cr@p? Will you cut them loose from FAC/DWYL? Will you find them external perm work?

[nelsonic]

@rub1e so many (good) questions here. Might be worth splitting them out in case further discussion is required on any of them...

[nelsonic]

Responsibility for finding perm work for people...

(Without any exaggeration) there are _thousands_ of "_tech_" recruiters in the world and we've met only a handful who know the difference between Java and JavaScript (and even then, a couple of them _memorised_ the answer) ... yes, its that bad! :cry:

Why is this the case? and is it a problem?

The objective of a recruiter is that of a sales person, they are focussed on the numbers and will sell the opportunity to the candidate using every trick in the book to pain it as the best 'opportunity" available in the marketplace ... and once they have "placed" you (locked in their commission), you are dead to them ...

Recruiters not understanding the technology is a problem because they will try to place people at the company that offers the highest commission not the one that will give the developer the best learning opportunities or interesting work.

Our _mission_ will be to find work for people based on what drives them: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation somewhere they will be happy and thus more productive.

The duration of the initial agreement (4 months) is to not overwhelm anyone. We are fairly confident that we will find work for people beyond that initial timeframe but we don't want anyone thinking they are "locking themselves in" to anything.

 Will you be Selective?

Yes. We only want to work with people who want to work with us more than anything else. We know that will not be all 16 people in any cohort.

On the subject of people being "cr@p" ... We consider ourselves pretty good judges of character, so we expect to know long before the 16 week course has ended whether a person is going to be an "A Player" or not... A key point to note here is that the people who are fantastic at coding, might not be great team players; we will find them work somewhere they will learn teamwork...