Many of local and global firms have strong links with the co-op programme. At Sybase, an enterprise software company that spun-off from the original WATCOM Corporation, with over 250 employees in its Waterloo campus alone, 15% of its current employees are Waterloo co-op students, and more than half of their Waterloo staff is former co-op students. It acts as a steady source of new hires, because firms know that the students have work experience, and they get an opportunity to evaluate their performance in the work place before hiring them.