TL;DR: students’ mentality is shifting towards getting jobs at startups. Consulting businesses are no longer recruitment kings when it comes to fresh graduates.
Jobshop IST @ Lisbon, Portugal
Instituto Superior Técnico (often mentioned as “Técnico”) jobshop took place on the 6, 7 and 8th of May (2014). It’s a cool place to be if you’re hiring “prototype” engineers 🙂
A jobshop is a place where companies swag about their career programs, awesome perks and life-work balance (coff!). However, this year, Técnico’s students were able to find something a bit different…
Técnico’s students union (AEIST) invited JOBBOX to represent Startup Lisboa. We said yes. Actually, I’m a very active alumni and it made perfect sense to finally represent startups at my home university, someone had to take the first step! It was going to be the first year that startups invaded the corporate recruitment jobshop. A first big small step…
Partners in crime
We were indeed surrounded by huge enterprises such as PwC, Deloitte, TAP, Siemens… But, we were not deployed on the battlefront alone as our good friends over at HackerSchool also got a showroom to show-case some of their cool tech projects.
Our ranks were also joined by three special guests: Imaginary Cloud, Lunacloud and Seedrs. On the last day, Uniplaces team made a surprise appearance at our corner bringing in some extra startup flavour. All of these startups are part of the blooming Lisbon’s startup scene!
Our space was called “Startup Lisboa” because all of these startups are related to this awesome startup incubator. So, it made perfect sense to promote startups as well as the incubator who safe keeps them.
Student feedback
Due to historic reasons, what students expect from a jobshop is all that corporate bullshit¹⁰, some pens and stress-relaxation puff-balls. Still, on our corner, “toy catchers” would get no luck. Our goal was to show-case startup jobs as a viable alternative and not to hand out toys 🙂
“A startup is like a state entity that creates new businesses, right?”, “An incubator is like office space, right?”, “What the hell is Startup Lisboa?” or “What do you guys do?”. These were some of the comments our team got the chance to hear first hand.
Still, looks like all the media blabbering about “entrepreneurship” and “startups” has made a positive impact as roughly 80% of the students we met face-to-face at the jobshop already knew what Startup Lisboa is, some of the incubated startups and a few successes too.
Summer internships
Students went pro-active (!) and asked us to get a summer internship at startups. We weren’t expecting this but managed to come up with a solution and collect all the applications thanks to Survs, an online survey tool built by yet another Portuguese startup.
If you’re into spending your time learning a lot with startups, take 3 minutes of your time and submit your application.
Final score
- Startup Lisboa was present for the first time ever at Técnico jobshop;
- JOBBOX was the lead organiser and was joined by three awesome startups: Imaginary Cloud, Lunacloud and Seedrs;
- All startups were able to create awareness and reach out to cool techie students;
- Doing a summer internships at startups is the new must-do in town.
Cheers,
Pedro Carmo Oliveira
@pcbo
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