For a full list of requirements, please review our HOP article.

What are the limits on your Hackathon Onboarding Project (HOP)?

• When choosing your HOP, it’s important to select a project that interests you and challenges your abilities. You’ll present your 8-minute long HOP demo at the community-wide HOP demos meeting the week after your start date where you’ll talk about what you learned, what you would do differently, and what stretch goals you have.

What if you don't finish in time or your demo is bad?

• You may start your HOP with a clear end goal in mind. You may or may not reach that end goal by the time of your demo day! Our Engineer Partners (EPs) are encouraged to work on their HOP even after their presentation. A finished product is never the goal of the HOP demo. As long as you can explain your thought process, why you chose to work on this problem, and the problem you’re trying to solve, your peers will be excited to learn from you!

How are matches made?

• The Engineer Success team does their best to send your profile to SPs where there is alignment on some or all the following criteria: title, tech stack, values, industry, company size, and salary. If your goals, interests, and experience align with that of an SPs, we send along your profile for the SP to review. From there, the SP can choose to decline or accept your profile. If your profile is accepted, you will recieve a notification in your EPX Slack channel, and you can decide if you’d like to proceed in setting up an interview. Should you be unsure about how you’d like to proceed, you can always connect with the Engineer Success team.

When should I expect matches and interviews?

• Matches are sent to your epx-[name] Slack channel within your first two week at Commit and you could expect interviews to also be scheduled in your first two weeks.

How much time do I have to decide if I want to pursue a match?

• A decision on pursuing or not pursuing a match should be made within 24 hours. Should you need any support in deciding on moving forward with a match, the Engineer Success team is just a Slack message away!

Do you tell us why we are rejected, or provide other feedback? Is the feedback filtered?

• If an SP decides not to move forward with you as a candidate, the Engineer Succes team follows up with them for feedback. In some cases, they reach out to you directly. We try to be as transparent as possible with the feedback we send to you. This helps the Engineer Success team to identify ways to increase a better match for you in the future.

Should I tailor my Commit profile for each company, or have different versions that emphasize different things for different roles?

• There isn't a need to have multiple profiles for each company/opportunity. The beauty of your profile is that it’s organized in a way that clearly showcases your technical abilities, interests, and goals so an SP can better see if there is possible alignment. SPs also follow a similar format for creating their own profile which makes finding a match more efficient.

After an interview, when should I expect more information?

• Following an interview, you can expect an answer regarding next steps within 72 hours. Waiting isn’t necessarily bad! In many cases, SP teams are very busy and sometimes require a reminder from the Engineer Success team to provide a decision and feedback.

How much preparation should I be doing for interviews?

• We highly recommended reviewing the Interview Guide for EPs prior to an interview. This article includes tips and tricks for what to expect in an interview and how to prepare. Please reach out to the Engineer Success team if you require additional resources or information to prepare for your interviews.

How do I know if I need to adjust my profile/resume/LinkedIn?

• The Engineer Success team will look through your platform profile prior to sending it to SPs. Should we have any feedback and suggestions for your profile, we’d let you know.

Is it ok to say yes to match if I want to hear more, even though I suspect it won't fit?

• Yes! You may be surprised that the match is a better fit than you thought. If not, you just got some interview practice and learned about what you’re not interested in.

Is there an average or percentage of how many interviews an EP is expected to accept? Ex/ If there are 5 offers, is it okay to decline 2 with reasoning?

• Although we currently don't have the average or percentage of how often an EP accepts an interview, if there are interview opportunities that come up where you're not interested in the company or don't feel the role would suit you, it's okay to reject it. However, we'd just like to know why you're rejecting it. That will help us make better matches for you in the future. We do hope that there is a good chance that out of the 5 opportunities, that you'll likely be interested in at least a few. Let's say it was the case that you didn't feel the majority of opportunities are a fit and Engineer Success is having trouble finding a match. We'd then reach out to chat more about your goals and interests so we can work to support you in this process and make sure the program can still support your needs. You can read more about this in the EP Expectations article. A key thing that can help the matching process from your end is having an open mind, so even if an opportunity arises that you don't think is a perfect match, it could still be worth interviewing with the company to get a better sense if it indeed isn't a great fit or is a better fit than you thought.

Are SPs also hiring from outside Commit?

• SPs might also be hiring outside of Commit in order to have a range of candidates to fill their positions.

How do I know if I'm meeting Commit's expectations?

• Commit’s expectations from HOP demos is that engineers are approaching the assignment as a learning opportunity to tackle a project or interest that you may have not had the bandwidth to do so before. It is never about perfection but rather the process and sharing the why and lessons learned with the rest of the community. Communication, contributions, and participation are all expectations of you throughout your journey with Commit. To understand more fully what’s expected of you as an EP, take a look at our EP Expectations article.

How often do pilots lead to graduation?

• You can usually expect it to take 1-2 pilots before graduating to an SP full-time. Keep in mind that this is just an average and everyone is different. Engineer Success’ goal is to work closely with you throughout the whole process to help find you the best possible fit.

Is there a limit to the number of pilots?

• There isn’t a limit to the number of pilots an EP can do. As mentioned above, the Engineer Success team aims to create a long-lasting match as soon as possible, but we know that in some cases it can take some time to find the perfect match.

When can we nominate people?

• Anytime! We are always looking to expand our community of like-minded entrepreneurial startup software developers! To nominate a peer, message your epx-[name] Slack channel with your peer's name and email.

What kind of people should we nominate? How do we know if a colleague is right for Commit?

• Developers who excel in our community possess the following qualities: Entrepreneurial, interested in startups, self-starter.

We are looking for engineers just like you!