Over 160 organizations of all shapes and sizes have hired Lighthouse Labs graduates! We're connecting with our employers to shed some light into the hiring process, and learn about their experience taking on Junior Developers fresh out of Bootcamp.

First up, we have Krystal Souza from AppBridge!

What is AppBridge?

Developed using modern technology, AppBridge provides a powerful and comprehensive suite of tools to help business of all kinds succeed in moving to Google. AppBridge Surveyor scans, reports and analyzes enterprise content so they can deploy the secure, Google Apps infrastructure they want; AppBridge Transformer migrates, transforms and maps content with zero downtime; and AppBridge Archivist collects, organizes and preserves data.

What technologies or languages/stack does your development team use?

C# (including using MEF for composition), Microsoft OWIN, MySQL, MongoDB, NUnit, OAuth apis, AngularJS, Typescript, ES6, Sass, Git and Jira.

How many bootcamp students have you hired?

We have hired 4 bootcamp students.

How has your experience been with hiring a Jr. Dev from Lighthouse?

Lighthouse made the process of hiring graduates really easy. A dedicated career services representative was assigned to understand our business and what we do, from there she came up with a short list of candidates that had the skillset we were looking for and provided us with all of their resumes to review.

Our representative acted as a liaison and organized meetings that met our timeline. We were able to quickly and effectively hire our superstars within a week.

How does your Bootcamp student(s) compare to a Developer on your team from a more traditional background?

We are pleased with the graduates of the Bootcamp program as they display a real sense of passion and eagerness that we look for in all our hires. We were surprised and delighted at the diverse background of the students and found that this added to our goal of building cross-functional teams.

What are the pros and cons of hiring a bootcamp grad?

Pros of hiring a bootcamp grad:

Employers have a talented group of driven individuals to review, and initial salary expectations is set by the school.

Cons of hiring a bootcamp grad:

The initial investment in training and mentoring Junior Developers that may have little coding work experience before the program.

What appealed to you about hiring a bootcamp grad?

At AppBridge, we are looking for Junior Developers that have drive, dedication and a passion to learn new technologies. Our focus on thought-leadership, quality and innovation led us to look for programs and schools that displayed a commitment to the technology industry coupled with an intensive and focused program that produced students of the highest caliber.

Why a Lighthouse Labs student in particular?

AppBridge partnered with Lighthouse Labs because the program is entirely responsive to the needs of the employer. There was no bottlenecks when it came to accessing their pool of students and resumes were openly shared with us. There was no hidden commitment or sponsorship requests and the career services representative seemed to care about making a good quality match rather than bench-marking number of graduates placed.

**If you're interested in learning more about hiring Lighthouse Labs graduates, connect with our [Career Services](/careers) team, visit our [Employers page](/employers) or attend our upcoming [Employer Speed Dating + Demo Days](/events).**