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by Benjamin_Dobell 1297 days ago
Good bootcamps won't need to pad their employment numbers, because they'll be producing good quality candidates. So all you're really doing is highlighting the fact you went through a lower quality bootcamp. There's so many bootcamps I don't know which ones are legitimate and which are scams. Without that signal on the candidate's CV, I'd have no idea where the one the candidate has been through ranks. However, to me that's a clear indication that the bootcamp (or perhaps the candidate) are dodgy.
2 comments

If the vast majority of applicants from one bootcamp claim to be employed by them then I can see why you would be suspicious, but I’d be hesitant to throw out all bootcamp grads who say they’ve been employed by their bootcamp.

There might be perfectly legitimate reasons to be employed. Maybe they were aiding instruction of earlier students as they got more experience, akin to a tutor or teaching assistant in colleges. Maybe they took a temporary job because they were unable to find a job right out of bootcamp, and the reasons for not being able to get a job don’t necessarily have to be negative (e.g. they had familial commitments).

Getting a job from a bootcamp is already hard and it wouldn’t quite sit right with me to reject someone outright for something that could be explainable. Perhaps if you are drowning in applicants then you are forced to be harsher out of practicality, but even then surely there’s a better filter then someone reporting what is ostensibly an experience applicable to job they’re pursuing.

> Good bootcamps won't need to pad their employment numbers, because they'll be producing good quality candidates

If you make this the metric to evaluate on, you're going to end up with the Ivy League scenario where bootcamps only admit people who would have succeeded anyway.

The POINT of education is to give people a chance to succeed who were likely to fail without it, and you have to accept a failure rate for that to work.