Hiring 21 new developers at once with cohort-based hiring and its impact on developer community

About n11.com

n11.com is one of Turkey's leading open market concept shopping platforms, offering a flawless shopping experience by bringing together millions of products and more than 300,000 registered business partners with its customers.

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Program Summary

Patika and n11.com started two bootcamps in December 2021 (Java Backend Development and QA) and trained candidates until the end of Janurary 2022. Among hundreds of applicants, 74 candidates were admitted to the bootcamps. n11.com hired 21 of these candidates in cohorts as of March 2022 upon completion of the bootcamps.

At the end of 2021, n11.com was growing fast and there were two major challenges faced when hiring developers:

1. Burdensome operations in traditional hiring: Recruiting new developers one by one meant trying to attract good candidates for job postings, filtering 1,000+ applications for each post as much as possible just by looking at resumes, taking time from many team members in the selection process, and finally extending offers at different times, hoping that the recruited candidate is a good match. These operations can be manageable to recruit a few people, but the time and cost increases exponentially when hiring many candidates at once.

2. Challenge of onboarding many team members at once: Technical teams need to devote significant time to mentoring newcomers especially if candidates start the job at different points in time. It’s a significant burden and a constant interruption for technical teams, who already have a lot to do.

We launched two bootcamps for n11.com, so that the company can hire as many people as it wants in cohorts at the end of the bootcamp after seeing the real job performance.

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Patika’s online learning platform of 30,000+ developers helped us select the right candidates:

• Application period: The bootcamps attracted hundreds of applicants in a short time thanks to Patika’s existing community.
• Selecting the right candidates using good data: Applicants were evaluated with their performance on Patika’s learning platform, tests and interviews. n11.com made the final selection using the shortlist provided by Patika.

The 8-week bootcamp experience helped candidates onboard to n11.com even before getting hired: During bootcamps, candidates had to learn and build projects. This helped n11.com make more informed assessments on the real work skills of candidates. n11.com teams also organized 14 workshops: Technical team managers came together with the participants and explained the n11.com approach to problems, principles, and culture.

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Thanks to organizing two bootcamps, n11.com contributed to the developer ecosystem by providing high quality training to 74 new developers in total. Among these, 21 developers were hired directly in cohorts in only less than 2 months!


Cohort-based hiring not only met n11’s talent needs, but also made great social impact:

💪 Ülkü Arıkanoğlu landed her first software development job just right after her graduation.

🚀 Participants had the chance to launch their dream career.

“This bootcamp has become an architect of my career in software development. My self-learning journey started by taking online trainings from Patika and continued with this bootcamp.”

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“This bootcamp made me feel ready for the industry. There were so many things that I did not know that even I did not know :) Thanks to this n11.com bootcamp, I could practice and understand real business problems for the first time.”