Why Career Changers Might Be Your Startup's Secret Hiring Weapon: A Q&A with Huon Latham

Finding the right developer for your early-stage startup can feel impossible. You're competing with big tech salaries, you need someone who can wear multiple hats, and traditional hiring approaches are expensive and time consuming.

But what if the best candidates aren't coming from traditional computer science programs? Huon Latham, a career coach who spent five years at General Assembly helping career changers transition into tech, shares why startups and career-changing developers are often a great match—and how founders can avoid the most common hiring mistakes.

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Can you tell us about your experience helping developers find their first roles?

I'm a facilitator who works with organizations and individuals to create fulfilling careers. For five years at General Assembly (GA), I helped people transition into tech careers, including software engineering.

 What made this unique is that GA specializes in adult career changes—people weren't coming to us as empty vessels. They came from hospitality, medicine, teaching, law, business analysis, you name it. They'd train in technical skills and we'd help them build the narrative to confidently sell their career change to hiring managers.

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Why do you think startup founders should consider career changers over traditional computer science graduates?

Startups and career changers are actually a natural fit. If you're hiring only software engineers with three-year computer science degrees, those people have academic knowledge but don't necessarily have practical coding experience. More importantly, they've existed in a very specific, often rigid dynamic that isn't as creative as startups need.

In a startup, if you're a developer, you're not just one title. You might be talking to clients, stakeholders, backers, doing admin work, or even putting on a suit for an investor meeting because you need to look bigger that day. Career changers come with that flexibility. They're more interested in how the business works, what the product does, who uses it. They're fully formed people who can sit in front of a client and use lateral thinking to solve problems.

Plus, startups in the earlier stages often can't pay senior developer salaries or provide the structured roles that large organizations offer. Career changers are looking for organizations that will invest in them and let them grow—they're less hung up on titles and compensation and more focused on finding the right opportunity.

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Can you give us a real example of where this worked well?

Absolutely. We had a startup in financial services—a team of five across Sydney and Melbourne. They were struggling to hire because they had limited time and budget. Traditional candidates were either juniors asking "What exactly do I do? Can someone sit beside me all the time?"—which works in large organizations but not startups—or seniors demanding high salaries and equity they couldn't afford.

They hired one GA software engineer in 2021 and were amazed. This person asked great questions, was curious and independent, would work on problems then check in with "Is this right?" before continuing. They loved it so much they asked to hire two more. We ended up placing three GA graduates in different technical roles—one software engineer, one business analyst, one sitting between roles. Because our students were career changers, they were flexible with titles and just wanted to work in tech.

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What are the biggest mistakes you see startup founders make when hiring developers?

The biggest mistake is when ego gets in front of your product or team-building goals. I saw one founder who had very specific rules—like if your portfolio website showed "powered by Squarespace," you couldn't work in UX because you "don't understand optics." That's lacking empathy for someone who's unemployed and paying for a course. Done is better than perfect.

This same founder would spend entire interviews talking about himself rather than asking questions about candidates. People who could stroke his ego got hired. That's a faulty process that leads to poor hires.

More broadly, founders often have unnecessarily complex processes—three rounds of coding challenges or multiple interviews for no reason. Your process should be efficient for both you and the candidate.

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What's your recommended hiring process for resource-constrained startups?

Start with a realistic coding challenge—something that reflects what they'll actually do, but not exploitative where you could deploy their work without paying them. If you're happy with that, move to what I call a "vibe check" interview.

Get really clear on your culture and growth plans for the next one to five years. Have meaningful talking points, not just buzzwords. You want to hire someone who will grow with your organization and is genuinely excited about it.

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How can founders write better job descriptions to attract the right candidates?

Don't write job ads that look like everyone else's. Write YOUR job ad with your tone of voice. Be really clear: "This is who we are and what we're about. If you're excited about that, cool. If not, that's fine."

Spend time getting clear on three things: What are the top three cultural traits you want from someone joining your organization? And what are three things they could tell their friends at a barbecue that they're excited about in their job?

Write your job ad like it's a cover letter from the heart. If someone's swapping 40-50 hours of their week for you, be clear what an achievement looks like at the end of the week and whether they'll be excited about it.

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What about diversity in hiring? How should startups approach this?

People would approach me about this all the time. My background pre-tech was working with asylum seekers and refugees, so when I came into the tech space and people said "I want to talk to you about diversity," I was like, "Cool, tell me what you mean." And they were like, "Girls." And I was like, "Oh, is that diversity? Is that what you mean? You want to hire women?" And they were like, "Yes." And I was like, "Oh, okay, that's not what diversity means to me, but okay."

The organizations that did it really well—like the Mantel Group, Bendigo Bank—they hire close to 50-50 teams across all departments and get all the academic benefits: better problem solving, people who are happier at work, people who stay longer. But on the flip side, there were people who'd approach us and say "I need to hire girls." And I'd be like, "Cool. Do you have any women in the dev team at the moment?" They'd be like, "No, she'd be the only one." That was always a massive red flag.

When I first started placing candidates in 2020, female devs who joined those kinds of teams  would come back to me and say "That was horrible. I was never given any challenging projects. When I said I wanted more challenging projects, I was accused of complaining." A couple didn't pass probation, a couple quit. Those managers had potentially never really worked with women, and so you can't just hire one. You have to hire three or four so they have each other for support. No one likes to feel like they're the only one, whether that's because of their gender identity, religious identity, or ethnic identity.

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You mentioned that career-changing programs had about 40% female graduates. What happened to these women after graduation?

Actually, our female software engineering candidates had better placement rates than male candidates, largely because organizations were actively addressing existing gender imbalances. Most placements went well, except for those token diversity hires I mentioned.

The barrier wasn't getting hired—it was support systems. Women who thrived had mentors, networking opportunities, and managers who gave them time to ask questions and grow. The ones who left after a year were in organizations where they got the same boring tasks repeatedly, weren't given challenging projects, and had managers who weren't generous with time and knowledge.

This isn't unique to women—all junior developers need support. But those support systems are more entrenched for men in tech because many managers are more comfortable building rapport with people of the same gender.

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Any final advice for startup founders about making a dev hire?

Be clear on what your priorities are when hiring. I've seen founders say "We have so much work, we need to hire a dev" when they actually need an administrator. Don't hire a junior developer and give them admin work—that's demoralizing for everyone.

Figure out three things that person will do that excites them daily, and three things you'll be excited about when you hire them. Be realistic about timelines and funding. And if you're non-technical, consider hiring on a contract or project basis first to grow your network and find the right long-term person.

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Any advice for career changers reading this who might be interested in working at startups?

Absolutely. First, understand that your non-traditional background is actually an asset. Software engineering isn't just writing code—it's having team meetings, understanding the problem, communicating with non-technical stakeholders, understanding business value, and prioritizing. So no matter what you were doing before, there's almost certainly going to be some transferability of those skills.

What's great about a career changer is that you're more fully fleshed people than a university graduate at 21 years old. You can really use that lateral thinking and those lateral business skills. You're more interested in how the business works, what the product is, who the product is being used by.

When you're applying, focus on building that narrative that you need to confidently believe the career change can happen. Show those transferable skills in your cover letters and interviews. Because you're not going to be the world's best coder going into your first tech job, but you still might be the solution that a business needs in terms of their team dynamics.

And here's the thing —people who are interested in working in startups are interested in working in startups, not in large organisations. Big organisation means small role, small organisation means big role. You have to be more dynamic and understanding. The right startup will see that you're willing to fulfill slightly more functions in a slightly scrappier way—and that's exactly what they need.

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Huon Latham offers confidence and career coaching through Huon Latham Coaching. Learn more about her services on her website: https://www.huonlathamcoaching.com/