A Week of Conferences (Part 2)

The Garage

At 9am on a chilly Monday morning, I strolled down to the Said Business School with my housemate Alasdair Bell, the current President of OE (Oxford Entrepreneurs). Over the weekend, Alasdair and I had been discussing the topic for the morning Garage session – dedicated to OE. The “Garage” at Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford is a workshop where dozens of people get divided up into small groups; the groups are then guided through a multi-stage creative process and subsequently come up with ideas related to the topic in question.

I suggested:

“How can start-ups compete with Goldman Sachs to hire Oxbridge graduates?”

– a question to which many young British founders would like to have an answer. Given that the majority of the participants in the session would be current students, they settled on:

“How can we make it more appealing for graduates to go and work on a start-up rather than a large corporate?”

After some organised brainstorming which involved hundreds of Post-it notes, the groups settled on their favourite ideas. These ranged right through from a start-up in a day competition for students to a new religion with a start-up church! Sure, start-ups are definitely more than just a job – they’re a way of life, so should we create a religion for them? “Give us this day, our daily users, and…”

In my group, the idea of a Careers Fair for start-ups received the most votes. Sumon Sadhu and Rob Jones (Creative Director, Oxford Entrepreneurs) spent some time developing the idea further. It’s clear that there are deep pain points that need addressing on both sides:

• Start-ups struggle to hire top graduates. They can’t afford to hire the Randolph Hotel out for a night in Oxford. They don’t have the luxury of sitting alongside Investment Banking, Management Consulting and Law with their own fairs attracting thousands of students. Outside of their immediate personal networks, it’s very difficult for start-ups to access the talent. Even when they do advertise positions, the people who apply are often not the people they really want.
• Students generally don’t hear about the opportunities available in top start-ups. The thought of looking at what’s available on the market, creating a shortlist and sending out 10 applications (a la corporate job hunting) to the top 10 most appealing companies just doesn’t occur. And even if they wanted to find these start-ups, where would they start their search?

Personal contact is a crucial component in the recruitment process. Why should students only have the choice of careers fairs filled with City recruiters? Why not have a fair for start-ups too?

Having discussed the idea with Rajeeb Dey, a co-founder of Enternships^TM, it could well become a reality in 2008. If you want to get involved, e-mail me with your ideas.