Founder Q&A Part 2: About Maverick
Why did you start Maverick Software Consulting?
We started Maverick Software Consulting because we saw local companies struggling to find enough IT talent and wanted to prove that there is an incredible pool of untapped IT talent right here in the United States. In 2006, more and more companies were looking offshore for help. We figured if companies were able to send work halfway around the world to India or China, why wouldn’t they be able to send that same work to IT students here in the United States? We could price it about the same and the companies could hire the students on as full-time employees when they graduated.
How does Maverick work?
The basic concept is pretty simple. It’s a managed internship/apprenticeship. We make it easy for companies to work with computer science students while they are still in college. We take care of all of the heavy lifting for our clients (recruiting students, career fairs, interviewing, hiring, background test, drug screen, I9, pay roll, training, management, etc.). We provide the students with a laptop (i7, 8 Gig RAM with Solid State Drive) that has hardware to ensure our client’s data is secure and software that we use to remotely manage each student. The students work with our clients’ employees while they are still in college, helping development and testing teams with the various projects they are working on. When the students graduate, they have worked with professionals for one to three years and understand products, technologies, culture, etc. Our 100% job placement rate of student employees after college is a testament to how well the program is working to bridge the IT skills gap and remove the risk of making a bad hire all while getting IT work done at affordable rates.
What’s your vision for Maverick?
My vision is for Maverick Software Consulting to grow nationwide and leverage our end-to-end platform – a system that makes recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training and managing the students efficient and easy. Our goal is to make it completely seamless for companies to be able to work with IT students anywhere while they are still in college.
What challenges does Maverick help its clients solve? Students?
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We make it easy for our clients to find the best college IT talent to help them build their IT staff from the ground up.
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We make it easy for students to get the hands-on, technical experience they need in a flexible, high-paying part-time job that helps them pay for school and positions them for full-time employment when they graduate.
When did you know you were onto a good idea with Maverick?
After the first meeting we had with Thomson Reuters. They understood our vision from day one and were all in. It really hit home after we had the first 10 students hired and they were nailing it every day. It was amazing to see what they were doing and how much work they were getting done. Thomson Reuters saw this, too, and had us open three more offices and hire 70 more students for them over the next three years.
How has Maverick grown and evolved since its inception?
We’ve gone from a single client with 10 students working on folding tables in a small office to more than 40 clients (small start-ups, medium sized companies and huge multinational corporations) with more than 180 employees in seven states. In that time we’ve gone from working on only automated testing projects to the full Java stack (Java, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL, etc.), full Microsoft stack (C#, ASP.NET, SQL, etc.), web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, etc.) and open source projects (Ruby on Rails, PHP with MySQL, etc.).
Learn more by reading the entire Q&A series with Maverick founder Marty Hebig:
