helena.soukupova | March 11th, 2021
When looking to give back to the community, sometimes you need to think about which option is the best one for you. Sometimes life just brings you an opportunity that resonates with your personal experience and knowledge.
During my developer bootcamp a few months ago, I openly shared with my teammates that I have been working as the recruiter for OneLogin Engineering and Product teams. It’s more than obvious that people attending these bootcamps seek engineering roles, and I can now see— 3 months later — it’s not an easy process. It’s typically a second 3–6 months long journey to fulfill the dream of working as software engineers within solid companies.
Since indicating I was a recruiter, bootcamp students would reach out to me with questions about resume writing, sprucing up their LinkedIn profiles, getting through the first step of the recruiting process and negotiating offers. Often, bootcamp students tend to be overwhelmed with the onslaught of technical challenges, grappling with complex topics, and the ever-present “imposter syndrome.”
But let’s move back to the merit of this blog, how to give back to the community?
At OneLogin, we have a plethora of diverse backgrounds and experiences to draw on, and not just within our engineering team. You will find people who come from prestigious universities working harmoniously with bootcamp graduates and self-taught programmers. Diversity of thought and experience is a core pillar of innovation and delivering a terrific product. Our backgrounds are as diverse as the customers and developers we serve making securing apps and data easier every day.
As someone who’s been on an engineering recruiting team, a bootcamp student, and now an engineer, I found myself in a unique position to leverage my background to build and give back to the community of next-generation developers.
We are closely working with three bootcamps, helping students to land their dream jobs by sharing with them our honest experience about hiring, about the industry, and also about how to promote themselves to be “recognizable” on the job market for recruiters as well as for hiring-managers.
The virtual sessions have been so far quite successful. We’ve had the opportunity to speak with over 300 students so far and the feedback was amazing. Based on the overwhelming positive feedback we received, we’re considering the next step and I want to hear from you—Bootcamp Students, Self-Taught Programmers, or anyone interested in building secure applications.
We’re considering a OneLogin hackathon, open to the world, to promote and learn from you what you want to get out of authentication tools. If you’d be interested in a little learning, hacking, and networking, let us know, share your thoughts with us, connect with us on LinkedIn and let’s make this idea work. We will be happy to have your feedback until the end of March 2021.
The overall success of this program is about the right mix of the people who are presenting and ready to answer students’ questions. I feel this is the great place where thanks to all supporters from OneLogin: Courtney Harrison, Bob Dickinson, Blake Ramsdell, Matt Barrio, Dominick Caponi, Nancy Lambert - Brown, Andrew McIver, Jose Israel Martinez, and the overall OneLogin community and the OneLogin Cares initiative.
Bootcamps we are actively cooperating with:
Let’s connect and chat more:
Helena is an aspiring software engineer who loves helping people grow. As a Talent Acquisition Lead for the Engineering group at OneLogin, Helena was inspired to take the leap of faith and learn to code. She is now on her way to working in that same engineering group where she will be improving the OneLogin Developer Experience with her passion for the people-software relationship. She also puts on networking events and a networking workshop for the coding Bootcamp from where she graduated. Her focus is on helping starting engineers build their network and find the right job.