3 Career insights from Web Summit 2015

Along the way, there were a few interesting insights into what employers look for in their people and how the hiring process might change in the future. Let’s take a look at three of the most interesting career tips we heard over our three days at Web Summit.

Echoing findings in our recent employment monitor, Neil Vogel spoke about the importance of culture and attitude in reinventing about.com. While it was still a $100 million company About.cm was failing and on its way out of business. When Neil joined the business he set about fixing the culture and fixing the product then fixing everything else. The key changes in culture were overwhelming positivity, a focus on trust and honesty and an effort to hire and retain ‘believers’.

So what does this mean for you? We’ve blogged about the importance of attitude before but this adds an extra layer of detail. By bringing positivity, honesty and faith in the business to your job you aren’t just a ‘good employee’ you have the potential to reinvent a business.

CEO of Jive Software, Elisa Steele, spoke about another topic close to our hearts, the future of the workplace. During the talk Elisa discussed what would happen if you applied the sharing economy, the Airbnb approach, to people. Her suggestion was that in the future people won’t have one boss or one employer at a time, they’ll have many. Companies will share people and you will work on small projects for some businesses while working on a larger project for another.

It’s an interesting idea and one that certainly fits with the recent trend for people to spend less and less time with each employer and the increased popularity of contract or temporary roles. As a candidate, especially if you’re looking at technology or engineering jobs, your ability to adapt to multiple projects and work with a variety of departments or clients will be vital.

We already know that employers review your social media presence before hiring you, but Joanna Riley Weidenmiller of 1-Page took that a step further. She suggested that in the future employers will place greater emphasis on the value of your social connections. In other words if you and another candidate have very similar qualifications and both perform well at interview it could come down to your network.

Employers would naturally be drawn to candidates with large networks of similarly skilled workers and former colleagues. From an employer’s point of view, if you have an amazing network they could use that to source teammates for you. The question they asked on stage was, ‘why try to find every superstar one at a time when you can get a whole Basketball team who already know how to succeed together?’

The lesson for candidates here is simple – don’t just work on your social media profile, work on your network. Make connections with former colleagues and skilled peers and curate those connections to make sure that if an employer looks at your network they will find more than just ‘friends’ they’ll find a whole basketball team.