There are three fundamental cornerstones to what Landing is today: Community, Product, and Team. And, this past year hasn’t fallen short on contributions to all of them.
Community
We’ve never put together as many community moments as throughout 2019 which further contributed to a positive and active community both online and offline.
Landing Festival
We went back to Berlin (and it was cold!) and changed our venue back in good old Lisbon (and it was hot!).
I have to admit these two editions were my favorite so far, both speaker line-ups were incredible. Check the Berlin line-up and the Lisbon line-up. Shout out to Sandi Metz must-watch talk “You’re Insufficiently Persuasive”.
I think it’s fair to mention this was the first year where we truly invested in bringing together local and international content partners, and we put together our own Career track with very interesting talks. I’m quite proud of the existence of this track because it’s a natural fit with Landing’s belief that individuals must have ownership of their professional careers in order to ensure their ability to keep-up with the future of work.
As usual, it all ends in beautiful hugging and dancing at our boat party 🙂
Looking forward to seeing you again in 2020 😉 don’t forget to save your spot for the next edition!
Tech Hiring Conference
We’ve also internationalised our Tech Hiring Conference where we bring together Hiring Managers and HR professionals to discuss topics such as employee retention, recruitment processes, employer branding, and talent engagement. We organised it for the third time in Lisbon at the most beautiful venue ever and for the first time ever in Munich, you can check here for a wrap up of the Munich’s Tech Hiring Conference.
To provide a bit more context, the Tech Hiring Conference acts as the physical manifestation of an online community called Tech Hiring Community — its members are tech hiring professionals who want to share with each so we can improve the HR community as a whole. Feel free to join the slack group discussion! We’re having a new “get together” on the 5th of February, 2020 — save your seat!
I’m especially happy about our team member’s talks:
- Diogo Oliveira who went on to talk about Employee Retention (slides);
- Pedro Prats on How to use Cognitive Science in Product Development;
- And myself about Employee Engagement (slides).
Some other relevant events we organised in 2019:
- “PHP Open Doors”, the overall concept of this type of event is to bridge the gap between talent and companies by bringing a “hire” right to the company’s doorstep. It’s a two-day event and flights are on us, more to come in 2020.
- Several meetups in Lisbon and Porto, definitely something we didn’t feel shy about putting together 20+ meetups and we’re not stopping here, more to come so come follow us on meetup.com. We also organised a webinar about Contractors which you can check our post-mortem here (link to rewatch it is inside).
- “TOP Program” to attract talent from Brazil and other countries in South America to Portugal. We took care of the red tape and we selected top talent candidates, from a pool of 5000+ applicants, to travel across the Ocean to start a new career in Europe. This program was mentioned on Brazilian media Folha S. Paulo and O Globo.
Promoting Portugal as a tech hub
We’re from Portugal and we constantly promote Portugal has a business destination as we’ve helped so many companies successfully land in Portuguese shores. In collaboration with Volkswagen, we’ve put together a “Being a tech professional in Lisbon” video promo and an eBook that contains all the information about hiring in Portugal titled… “Hiring in Portugal” — you can download it here.
Scholarship giveaway
This is not the first time we awarded a scholarship… Back in 2015, we’ve offered one university scholarship for a top graded student and we were challenged by our partner Ironhack to change 50 more lives. This is something I’m particularly proud of since I wrote this piece of content during late 2018 about changing my own view on coding bootcamps. I hope more professionals, especially those who recruit everyday, follow my lead and change their mindset!
Product
Compared to 2018, we absolutely rocked in terms of product development and continuous improvement in 2019 with several key moments described below. It’s critical for a company like ours to foster a startup innovation mindset through our ranks, only with such a mentality can such endeavours be achieved.
Tech Recruiters-as-a-Service
This business product is something our clients had been asking us for ages and we’ve always resisted moving forward with it. We were asked to provide our clients with well-trained tech recruiters, remote or on-site, to help them increase their recruitment capacity.
The main rationale for not pursuing such an opportunity in the past was because we wrongly assumed that we’re a tech business, therefore, we can’t build a people-oriented business. However, as HR Tech is increasingly a people and technology blend and since we’ve been founding members of the Tech Hiring Community (join our community slack) where many individuals in HR Tech talk and exchange ideas… We started to fade away from our earlier stance and, coincidence or not, we were yet again challenged by one of the clients, Sky, who asked for us to train and place tech recruiters in their ranks. So, we set out to find the right person in the market who’d be crazy enough to be our “beta tester” and Marlena Szylar dutifully took the challenge head-on and since then we’ve been training and placing tech recruiters in our clients, and we couldn’t be happier about it.
Landing.work: matching the right projects with the right tech contractors
Rapid technological advancements are causing a chaotic shift in fundamental aspects and assumed ideas of careers in our society. At a time when nobody knows the future of work, we see an opportunity.
Contracting has been something in the making since the early days of Landing.Jobs (or even before that when we rebranded from JOBBOX) but we never felt quite ready to “attack” this side of the work marketplace.
Since we launched Landing.Jobs, we’ve been actively asking our members to share with us their job search preferences and, four years later, our users’ collected data clearly said they were looking for other types of work besides full-time permanent jobs, in fact, they were looking for our platform to provide them with tools to take on independent work.
And, that’s why we launched Landing.Work — a platform that helps contractors find remote work and get paid for the work they do. We’ve been testing different hypotheses and asking our users and clients to come over to our office for some design thinking sessions… It’s been quite an experience, it’s like launching a startup within a startup. Exciting!
We’ve already made the first placements and helped companies and contractors find a better way to work together, looking forward to continuing this work deep into 2020.
Evaluation: multidimensional curation and tech assessments
One of our key promises to both talent and companies is our evaluation system as part of the matching. In 2019, we revamped our evaluation process to transform the way we are dealing with key recruitment dimensions.
We called this the ‘Multidimensional Approach’. The outcome is not a “fit badge” or to make upfront rejections. It’s a better way to help our clients streamline their recruitment processes and, at the same time, be more transparent with our community members.
We’ve introduced a new feature that allows companies to create their tech assessments — or choose one of our default tests. You can read more about it here.
One thing we’ve found out throughout 2019 is that the most successful individuals are the ones that have a perfect balance between honed soft-skills and proven hard-skills. Following up on this key finding, during 2020 we’re coming up with some surprises regarding the way we evaluate the soft-skills and also hard-skills of our community.
Our human-centered approach to the recruitment process forces our team to dedicate more time to get to know our talent to help them know their value, improve their skills and land the right job or project.
Team
At this point, it sounds like we’ve done quite a lot in terms of Community and Product, but the Team who does all of these activities is where we actually evolved more.
New Landers
We’ve grown our team to over 50 Landers during 2019 and you can follow our daily life on our Instagram. There’s obviously some growth pains especially when it comes down to communication but we’re overcoming them and building the right leadership team, and fostering trust and productivity which are necessary to continue our growth.
Some team members I’d like to highlight are Pedro Prats, João Aires, Damian Ciocianu and, last but not least, Pedro Moura… who has been an advisor for Landing.Jobs ever since we started and he’s guilty as charged of introducing me to José Paiva back in 2013.
One person who can’t be dismissed is Rita Gouveia who took on a new Tour of Duty in early 2019 to become our Talent Acquisition Specialist and she’s doing a great job at it!
New Office
Due to the team growth, we’ve had to find a new Headquarter and that’s why we changed offices recently. We’re now at Rua Braamcamp 9, working from an iconic Lisbon building called “Franjinhas”… Our new home used to be a digital school and after undergoing some construction work we were able to make it a great workplace, I’m quite happy about our choice.
This new office allows us to be more community-active, we’re going to host a lot more community events in our office in 2020 with our local partners. Our own People Operations Lead, Rhaica Silva, confessed that she finally has the right working grounds to setup our own training sessions (we call them Landing.sessions), impromptu team buildings and “breaks from work” sessions (we call them Landing.breaks).
All in all, I’m quite proud of our achievements as a team and how we’ve considerably helped our customers (both talent and companies) and the market become a better place, it does feel like we’re getting somewhere with our mission:
To find a way to improve how professionals land a job, learn and teach, decide where to go and when to begin. We’ll change the way careers are planned and executed.
Landing’s mission is to transform career development and hiring to reshape the future of work.
To join us on this mission, check our company page on Landing.Jobs!
I know it sounds like we’ve done a lot in 2019, however, we’re coming up with some great news for early 2020, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how the future is going to work for us!
Pedro,
Co-founder @ Landing
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