Episode 9 – How to get a job with a tech start-up with Alastair Paterson

February 4, 2015 Podcast

Welcome to the 9th episode of the Graduate Job Podcast

This week I speak with Alastair Paterson, CEO of Digital Shadows, a hot UK tech start-up who are flying in the field of digital security. Alastair shares his considerable experience to tell you exactly what you need to do to get a job with a tech start-up. We cover all aspects of the recruitment process at a small start-up, from how to get an internship, how to get the job itself, common mistakes people make, how to stand out from the crowd, and finally how then to negotiate yourself some equity.

You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Additionally, you can subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio.

MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • The recruitment process at a tech start-up – (4.30)
  • Skills tech start-ups are looking for in graduates – (8.24)
  • How to stand out from the crowd in the tech start-up scene – (10.27)
  • How to effectively use social media to interact with small tech companies – (11.24)
  • Common mistakes people make in applying to tech start-ups – (14.04)
  • What the working life is like at a company like Digital Shadows – (15.45)
  • Top tips to get an internship with a tech start up – (17.10)
  • What the internship recruitment process looks like at a London tech start-up – (20.58)
  • Whether to start your career with a big company or a small tech start-up – (23.32)
  • How to negotiate salary and equity at a tech firm – (25.28)

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Transcript – Episode 9 – How to get a job with a tech start up with Alastair Paterson

James:   Welcome back everyone to the Graduate Job Podcast, with your host James Curran. The Graduate Job Podcast is your weekly home for all things related to helping you on your journey to finding that amazing job. Each week I bring together the best minds in the industry, speaking to leading authors, entrepreneurs, coaches and bloggers who bring decades of experience into a byte size weekly 30 minute show. Put simply, this is the show I wish I had a decade ago when I graduated.

Today I discuss how to get a job with a tech start-up, speaking to Alastair Paterson, CEO and co-founder of digital security company Digital Shadows. One of the rising stars of London’s tech start-up scene, Alastair has taken Digital Shadows from his kitchen table, to the top of 1 Canada Square in Canary Wharf through to now opening up offices over in San Francisco. Tech companies from giants like Google to small start-ups are constantly in the news, and Alastair is well placed to offer brilliant advice on just how you can go about getting a job in this booming tech start-up scene. If you’re a budding Mark Zuckerberg, Prash Majmudar or Bill Gates then episode 9 is for you.

James:  I’m delighted to welcome today Alastair Paterson, CEO and co-founder of innovative tech start-up Digital Shadows. Digital Shadows are a cyber security company based in London and are flying at the moment; named in the top 25 hottest European early stage companies; one of the winners of FinTech Innovation Lab; named last year as one of the top 25 hottest London start-ups and FinTech 50’s most innovative and disruptive brands. Phew!

Alastair, welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast.

Alastair:      Thanks very much.

James: So, before we dive in and talk about all aspects of recruitment into the tech start-up scene, why don’t you tell us a little bit first about your background and how you started Digital Shadows and more importantly, what it is that you actually do?

Alastair: Sure. Sure. So, my background was originally as a bit of techie.  I did a computer science degree and then I started out working at Hewlett Packard doing research. But then I wanted to get into something a bit more practical and I joined a firm called Detica which is now part of BAE Systems; and essentially, there I was designing large risk and intelligence systems for government, and I ended up running a few different types of projects and ended up moving into pre-sales in the end. So, I was travelling around the world, running international pre-sales for the company. So, I was doing that for quite a while, we got acquired by BAE Systems which was interesting. I decided at the end I didn’t want to work for an enormous defence company so I set up Digital Shadows in May 2011 with my cofounder,  James Chappell and—-

Yeah, so what we do at Digital Shadows, it’s a cyber security company. We focus on securing the digital footprints of other companies. So, essentially, we’re looking online at all the information that is out there about a company, we find things that undermines their security or reputation in some way; and I guess, the vision behind the company was thinking about how the world was changing, away from the world in which you keep all your data as a company in the middle of your network, build walls around the edge with firewalls and antivirus and so on, and towards today’s world where everybody is using social media, things like podcasts, of course, as well. Everyone’s gone mobile. I expect a lot of people listening to this will be listening to it on some sort of smart phone or mobile device that just didn’t exist five years ago. Also, the cloud and cloud services are really big; and finally, the internet of things is coming along. So, all of these things mean that companies need to worry about what’s going on outside their networks. So at Digital Shadows we’ve got a monitoring system that looks at all of that information, say 20, 26 languages, 80 million sources of data, we find the risks to companies when they’re leaking data out or there’s a cyber threat in that data about these companies. So, that’s us.

James: Super. I know one of the key questions we get from listeners is — and the sector they’re interested in — is finding out more about how to get a job in a tech start-up and that’s one of the things we are going to cover today.

So, being a small firm, I guess you are very flexible in terms of how you’re able to recruit people and I know you’ve recently taken on some new graduates to join the team. Can you take us through the process and steps involved in recruiting them?

Alastair: Yeah sure. So, I think, certainly in the early days of the start-up and ideally as you grow as well, you use your personal network to start with. So, you, if you know someone personally and you know they’re good then that, that’s obviously your first port of call. After that, if someone else that you know recommends someone to you, then that’s worth a lot because it simplifies the whole process; you’ve got those trust points. So, in terms of ways to get into start-ups, I think, you know, getting directly introduced or recommended by someone who’s trusted by that start-up is probably the number one way of getting in.

Outside of that, of course, is you grow as a company. You can’t just rely on your own network. So you have to start going out and trying to recruit externally. There’s a bunch of different ways companies, start-ups can do that.   So there’s also events that are specific to start-ups; things like Silicon Milkroundabout in London. There’s also the Tech— I think it’s Tech City Jobs. They have a special one on financial services as well. So they’re sort of one way. But I guess fundamentally, most of our applications come in through our website and our online application process.

So what happens there is we’ll advertise a role. We get a number of applicants through. We then sift that down in a multi-stage process. So first step is just to check to, a sort of sanity check on the application to make sure it’s not just full of complete nonsense. Believe me, we get quite a lot of nonsense through, that I could tell you about.

After that, if they’re successful through the first sifting, then they make it to a phone interview. That will typically be up to half an hour with one of our employees. That will be sort of a general culture fit check and sort of, you know, going through the CV. It’s not particularly high pressure but one of the things we check very carefully is that the applicant knows who we are and what they’re applying for, which actually weeds out a lot of people. You know, it’s strange, you might think, but actually a lot of people just don’t seem to even have the first look at the website before they’ve got the call with the company. It’s seems quite strange.

So, then after that we have, usually, two face-to-face interviews. Ultimately one of those will be with myself and my co-founder, James, because we still personally interview anyone we’re going to hire. The final step is – perhaps a little bit unusual — we take them to the pub with the team and basically make sure that they get on well with everyone and the rest of the team wants to take them onboard. Because I think, you know, it’s one thing to being able to do the job; it’s another thing being, fitting into a team and being part of that team. There’s no drinking challenge as such, but it’s more of a, sort of a personality test and just check that do you actually want to work with us? Do we want to work with you?   How is this going to work out in reality? We try to only hire people there that you’d actually want to spend some time with in a pub.

James: And have you found many people have failed the pub test?

Alastair: You’d be surprised, but yeah because we check the feedback from our, from the rest of the team afterwards and it’s, it is quite tricky. I mean, we had one where, there was someone who was just very, very quiet and didn’t really engage with the rest of the team at all. You know, we wouldn’t want to hire someone who is the opposite end and really crazy but you sort of, you need to feel like you’re excited about hiring that person. They’re going to come in and do a good job but also make the place a bit brighter and nicer to work in, if you can.

James:   And in terms of specific skills and attributes that you are looking for from graduates, what would they be?

Alastair:  It depends on the role to some extent. Say, but there’s some sort of generic things we would look for in any applicant. When you’re in a start-up, it’s not like you’re in a big corporate environment where you get sat down and told exactly what you’re doing on every day, on a daily basis and there’s a very strong hierarchy and set of rules and procedures and processes. You’ve got to be much more self-starting in a start-up obviously, but you— there just aren’t enough people around to go there and keep telling you what you should be doing every day. So, we need to identify people that are comfortable in that environment, very self-starting, can just pick things up and run with them and be pointed at a more general area and figure it out, to some extent; we’ve had that in multiple roles.

I think the great thing from the applicant’s point of view, when they’ve got the job is that there’s huge potential to grow in a start-up that you just won’t have in a big corporate, because you can very, very quickly take on huge amounts of responsibility. The company is going to be really happy for you to take that on as best you can and to keep growing and growing inside the organization. So, yeah, in terms of, I guess, the number one thing I look for is someone who can deal with that sort of environment.

Alongside that, they’ve – as mentioned – they’ve got to fit in culturally with the team. So we’re looking, we only try to hire people who are sort of friendly and outgoing and can, could be client facing,  we’d have no worries about that whatever their role, even if it’s a very technical role, quite well rounded because of the nature of the environment.

James: In a team of 20 people you can’t afford to have people not getting along.

Alastair: Exactly. It’s – yeah. We had one hire like that. She was an intern that didn’t work out and it was apparent pretty quickly that that was going to be a problem. People like that can hide if you’ve got a multinational with thousands of employees, but not in the small start-up.

James: So, what can applicants do to yourself and other start-ups to make themselves stand out from the crowd?

Alastair:  I think, as I say, personal recommendation in is always the best route. But, aside from that, I think taking the time to really know the company and something about them, make it a very personal application and I realize that takes a lot more effort on the applicant’s behalf but I think there’s no point in applying to 20 jobs, just checking in a CV and getting 20 rejections and wondering why, when you can pick maybe four or five that you really, really want and take a bit longer to personalize the application. I think the best example I’ve ever seen was we advertised for a Sales and Marketing internship position a while ago and we had someone who branded their CV in our company style with our logo on it and various other things and they also, as part of their application, their covering letter had an assessment of our current marketing approach and how we could do it better. And it was a one pager in both cases and it probably didn’t take the guy that long but it made it what would have been a fairly standard CV rise right to the top in our interview process. So, I’d say, try to personalize it and you’ve got to take a bit of time over that. You can’t just do it while you sat on the beach at Salou or something like that. You’ve got to really do it properly.

James:  That’s true.   And how important is social media, in particular, such as tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, for you in recruitment? Do you actively use them or do you expect candidates to be interacting with you with them?

Alastair: I think it’s more of the damage you can do on there than the benefits necessarily. It’s both but we have a quick search around most applicants to see if there’s anything out there that’s interesting alongside all the information they provide in the process, as most employers do. I think the— No one is expecting you to be a robot and we’ve all got pictures of ourselves out in the pub or with friends or whatever. That’s all fine, but what you want to make sure is nothing too ridiculous is on there that might put off an employer. I think the— Yeah, people can engage with us through social media through Twitter and LinkedIn and things like and that is a bonus and shows that they’re interested, but I wouldn’t say it’s the be-all and end-all for us. I think it’s just good practice to think when you’re posting something online that it probably will be there potentially forever. And so, if there’s certain pictures on there, you might want to think about removing them before you apply and that could be a good thing. Also, just thinking about you should look fairly professional when you apply. So you probably don’t want your email address to be — You know, we had one from, I think, a MrSnakeySnakey @hotmail.com.

James:  Not particularly professional.

Alastair:  No. No; exactly. You’ve got to think these things through.

James: And do you actively then go out and check your clients– Well, the candidates Digital Shadows? I mean, if you’ve got someone’s CV coming through, would you run it through your search engine to see if you can find anything about them?

Alastair: Not as formally as that. Actually, it’s, we’re a company that’s advising other companies to be careful what they’re exposing online. So, of course, we need to be careful what we expose ourselves and part of that is anything that our employees post about ourselves that we would be concerned about. But for applicants it’s more of a general sense check, that they’re not a lunatic, more than it is us going through and trying to dig up anything particularly interesting on them.

James: What common mistakes would see from people that they make in the application process?

Alastair:   We’ve had – The number one thing is not personalizing it to the business in any way at all and just trying to chuck in a CV generically and we pretty much filter that out straight way. Certainly, as I mentioned, if they get to the first call and they still don’t really know what we do because they haven’t bothered to look at the website, that’s a massive red flag.

At the same time, we’ve had some pretty bad ones through where they’ve got the name of our company wrong — that’s fairly basic — even surprised. I mean, we’ve been called, Defence Shadows, Digital Works, and Dark Shadows in three applications. One of those was from someone at Oxford who you thought might have known better.

James:  To be fair, they are quite good names. You should, maybe, think about changing from Digital Shadows to Dark Shadows.

Alastair: Yeah, that sounds like the evil version of us; maybe another company.

James:  That’s pretty unforgiveable. If you can’t get the name of the company right you’re applying to, then you really need to have a really good look at yourself.

Alastair: Yeah. Exactly.

James: What would you say was the hardest question that you ask in the interview process?

Alastair: It depends on the applicant a bit. I mean, we don’t have a stock really hard question. It depends on the role. That said, the one that trips a lot of people up is we always ask, and usually in the first interview, what do we do at Digital Shadows and then leave it open and see how they describe it. You’d be surprised; that filters out about half the people who don’t seem to know what they’re interviewing for or what we do. So, strangely, a simple question like that can be the hardest, in some respects.

James:   Can you give an insight into your office and work environment and, you know, thinking of a start-up, people have visions of beanbags, slides, spending 20 percent of your time on outside activities. Is it like the Social Network?

Alastair:  Not quite like that at our place. Yeah; I think there’s a sort of category of start-ups that are more the .com kids with the skinny jeans who probably have a bit more of that going on. We don’t have any of the beanbags or any of that, but with that said, we work in Level39 in Canary Wharf which is a special FinTech start-up space and we’ve taken our own space now for about, we’ve got about 30 desks up in the 42nd floor; and so with that comes quite a few great facilities we can use. So, we actually do have a table football table; there’s an Xbox around the corner. At 4:00 every day they make cookies which are pretty nice; and then there’s a lot of weekly drink events and things like that. So, there’s plenty of that going on but in terms of bizarre office furniture and things like that, we’re not quite in the Google and Facebook category just yet; but open to suggestions if you’ve got any good ones.

James:  One day; one day you’ll get there.

So, shifting gears slightly and moving on to internships. So, I actually had a tweet into our Twitter channel at Gradjobpodcast from Andy G asking, “I’m looking for an internship with a tech start-up. What can I do to stand out?”   What advice would you have for Andy?

Alastair: Yeah, it’s a good question from Andy. I would say you’ve got to look at the company individually and tailor your application very much to their particular industry and type of business that they are. So, as I mentioned, for us demonstrating some sort of interest in cyber security with some knowledge and making it clear that this just wasn’t a generic application that you’ve sent everywhere else, is the number one thing.

I think in terms of practical steps, there’s a ton of—and there’s tons of start-ups in London and it’s an exploding scene and if you look online there’s, I know there’s two or three different start-up jobs websites. If you just google, “start-up jobs in London”, there’s two or three that we’ve advertised internships on before. So, certainly in terms of finding out what’s out there to apply for, there’s some pretty obvious stuff like that. And a lot of start-ups will list jobs on their site, that will often include internships. Having done that, just be aware that each of those jobs— I mean, when we advertise for an internship we get about 100 applicants we’ve got to sift through.

James: Per internship?

Alastair: Yeah, per place. And that’s probably not as many as some other companies get for some other jobs because we’re still relatively small and unknown. But even with a hundred, you get some pretty fierce competition there. So you’ve got to make sure that—You know, if you just chuck in a CV with no personalization at all and there’s 20 people in there that have made a real effort, you’re probably not going to make it even through the first hurdle.

James:  So, you mentioned you offering internships. I mean, how do you intend to use them? How long do they last? Are they paid? What sort of work can people expect?

Alastair: Yeah, it’s a bit of a range, actually. Back in the early days of the company, the first six months we didn’t pay ourselves anything. There was only three of us in the firm and beyond that we were at minimum wage for awhile, just to keep the thing afloat. So, we came across the scheme that we used in our, sort of, second year. It was an American free internship placement scheme called, Arcadia, I think it was and we had a couple of very bright, very good people through that program who were, who had a sort of allowance through the Arcadia program itself but we weren’t required to pay them because they were, effectively, just getting work experience where this is part of their trip to the UK. And at that stage in our company we couldn’t afford to pay for anyone. So, it was really great and they were good people and we are still in touch. But now we’re funded, we’re a bit further along. So, we absolutely pay for every internship place. We actually pay the London living wage, generally, rather than just minimum wage as well.

In terms of the roles, there’s– it’s sort of varied by the state we’re at. So right now we’ve got a couple of internships advertised but it’s specifically for people who are interested in, basically being a cyber-intelligence analyst. So we’re looking very specifically at courses that involve cyber security in some way, or intelligence and so that’s sort of not for everyone and we’re only targeting those specific courses.

But aside from that we’ve, at other times we’ve advertised for Sales, for Marketing to sort of general operations and admin. So, yeah, and you look at other start-ups out there, there’s almost any type of role you could imagine will be represented somewhere in London or elsewhere, I’m sure.

James:  Is your internship recruitment process different to that than it would be for a graduate role?

Alastair: It’s actually pretty similar.

This is something I didn’t mention. When there’s a specific job role, for example, something like cyber-intelligence analyst, we try to put some sort of task in the interview process. So, usually the first or second face-to-face interview, often the second one, we’ll set them some homework in the meantime, effectively, where we’ll try to come up with a small, sort of mini bit of project work that’s as close to what we do in the company as possible so we can actually see what their quality of work is like.   So, yeah, for this particular internship we’ll have a task as part of the process that wouldn’t be necessarily in other jobs.

We tried to, sort of, short-cut it once and just have a sort of one face-to-face and a quick phone interview for one of the internship positions and that was the one that went pretty badly wrong. So with that in mind, we – even for internships – we’re going to take the recruitment pretty seriously.

James: And do you have a high percentage of interns that you keep on or that would come back to you after finishing their studies?

Alastair: Yes, surprisingly high. I mean, we tend to not – certainly where we are now – we don’t take on an intern unless there’s going to be potential for a full-time role. So it isn’t just a, come in and do something, go and make the coffee and—

James: Do the filing.

Alastair: Yeah, whatever. Anyone worth taking on is with expectation that there is a full-time role but obviously, they’ve got to show that they’re good enough for that.   So, of the interns we’ve had in recently, we’ve actually – I think the last, something like four of the last five have ended up joining fulltime–

James:   It’s a good hit rate.

Alastair:   —which is very good. I doubt we’ll keep it quite that high because we got very lucky with a few pretty exceptional people and it’s hard to get great people, of course.

James:  Just shows the power, though, of getting an internship and if you do well and then four fifths are guaranteed, or get a job at the end of it, it shows that it’s worth putting the effort in at the beginning.

Alastair:  Yeah, that’s right. I think it allows the company to have a look at you but it allows you to have a look at the company as well and work out, do you actually want to work there or not. Do you like the people? Do you like the culture and environment, and it works both ways.

James: Definitely, which is just as important.

Alastair:  Yeah, I mean, it looks great on your CV as well. If I was looking at someone who has done a couple of internships in some sort of similar business versus someone with no experience, then you’d go for the person with the internships.

James: Definitely. Looking then at the tech sector in London more, generally, would you encourage recent graduates to forego working with larger companies to begin their career with a start-up?

Alastair: Yeah. I mean it’s a bit of a difficult one. I went and joined some pretty big companies before I did a start-up and I think I learned quite a bit in the process because I saw how they operated and got their, sort of, training and best practice and that sort of thing and then had to learn the start-up stuff after that. But a lot of people do just go straight to start-ups and I think that can work really well too. I think it’s a great way, in fact, to get a lot more varied experience a lot earlier in your career than most other companies would offer you. I think my first full time job at being at a consultancy was good in that respect as well because I was getting chucked into lots of different projects and learned a lot of skills in that respect; but I think a start-up is even more so like that. I think things to be aware of, most start-ups fail and most of them don’t pay very well either, and you might get some equity but the chances are, in a lot of cases that might not be worth very much in the end if the start-up doesn’t end up being one of the next big things.

So, but the flip side is, what have you lost in that situation? You can always go and get another job and you’ve probably learned so many great skills there that that isn’t a problem. And if you’re in one of the ones that does go really well, there’s probably no more exciting place to be than a company that’s taking off and you’ve been there from the early days.

So, I think the other thing I would say is it’s a lot easier to take these sorts of risks early in your career, before you’ve got a house and you settle down and everything else; you don’t have so many ties. So, yeah, if someone is interested in start-ups, let’s say, go through it now or at least very early in your career while you still can.

James: And you mentioned about salary and equity, would you recommend that people try to negotiate for a piece of equity coming in as a new graduate; or is that going to be pushing the boat out?

Alastair: Good question. I think to an extent it depends on the company. So with us, we give everybody equity that joins us full time; even new graduates. I think it’s an important part of our culture, that everybody is invested in the ultimate success of the company.   I think in some cases, for whatever reason, companies don’t do that and that’s the policy and you probably won’t be able to negotiate it. But I think it’s always worth at least bringing it up and having the conversation and seeing where that goes because the chances are they’re not going to be paying you as much as you could earn working somewhere else and equity is a good way for them to make it up to you without having to hand out a lot of cash that they don’t have.

James: That’s definitely worth a try and if you don’t ask you don’t get.

Alastair: That’s it.

James: So, you mentioned about the start-up scene in London booming. How is it looking around the rest of the country, because I know a lot of the media coverage does tend to be quite London-centric with Silicon Roundabout.

Alastair: Yeah, I think I’m probably a little bit guilty of that even on this podcast because we’re so London-centric ourselves. With that said, we’ve got a couple of developers who work offsite and one in Southampton and one in Cambridge. London certainly is not the only start-up scene in the UK. There’s plenty going on. I know recently in Bristol there’s a whole bunch of start-ups that were being touted around and some really good ones out there. From a security point of view, there’s a whole cluster actually. Sounds a bit strange but out in Malvern, out in the southwest is where there’s a lot of great cyber start-ups. But then, of course, all the other big cities now have got a bit of a scene going on. I know Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh and a number of others, there are start-up scenes that are thriving. But I think in terms of the number and the volume, of course the attention is going to be in London because it is a multiple affair of these other places.

You know, the other good thing, we’re a business to business company. We sell to banks and other institutions and most of them are headquartered in London, or at least the European operations are headquartered in London, and you just don’t get that in many of the other cities. So, London is great for start-ups because you have so much of a scene around. There’s also access to finance because most of the investment firms are here, finally the client base. If you are selling to other companies, there’s nowhere better to be.

James: It’s just a shame it’s so expense.

Alastair:  Yeah, well, that is absolutely true. Transfer costs and accommodation and office space are all big challenges for start-ups. That said, with a single days travel pass you can get around 10 clients in a day, potentially, if you do it right, and that’s a bit harder to do anywhere else.

James: That’s very true. So Alistair the time is, unfortunately, running away with us but before we finish, let’s ask a quick series of rapid fire questions. So, number one, which book would you recommend our listeners read and why?

Alastair:  Sure. So, I think with start-ups one of the best ones I’ve read is The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses and it’s interesting from a number points of view but he really does a great job of looking at the journeys that start-ups go and the things that matter in them.

So, if you’re interested in the scene, that’s really good. His take is very much on sort of business of the consumer, so .com start-ups. And the equivalent to business is called The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by a guy called Steve Blank which I’d also recommend.

James: Super. And which internet resource would you point to our listeners to?

Alastair: Quite tough. There’s a lot I use. I really like a guy called Paul Graham who’s based in the US. He’s set up and run the Y Combinator, an accelerated program for start-ups. He has a website, I think it’s paulgraham.com where he has a collection of his essays and his thoughts about start-ups that I think are particularly excellent. So I’d recommend that.

James: That’s a new one for me. So I’ll have to check that one out later. And all these links and books will be referenced in the show notes, so don’t worry about frantically scribbling them down.

And finally, what tip would you recommend that our listeners can implement today to help on their job hunt?

Alastair: I think, a bit of a constant theme through all I’ve said, but take the time to personalize your applications to companies. Make it clear that you’ve read about the industry and about the company and then you’ll stand out ahead of the next guy. Good luck with it.

James: Alistair, thank you very much for joining the Graduate Job Podcast today.

Alastair: Thank you.

James:  My thanks again there to Alastair Paterson for all of his insights and advice. In terms of key things that struck me, and if you didn’t pick this one up you really weren’t listening, is the need for personalisation. Alastair mentioned it 3 or 4 times, it’s a competitive market out there and sending bog standard generic applications just doesn’t cut it. As he said, there is no point sending out the same applications to 20 companies, pick 4-5 and really put the effort in. He gave the example of receiving 100 applications for an internship where 20 people personalised them specifically for his company. That’s what you need to be doing with each application. Make sure you are in that 20% can be bothered, otherwise, get used to not hearing back on your application.

The second point for me is such a basic one but one that so many people fall down on. Being able to answer the question, What do we do’. Now this isn’t just the case with niche tech companies, I’ve seen it with people applying to multinationals, consulting, banking, accounting you name it, people consistently fail because they lack a basic understanding of what the company actually does. You need more than a high level overview from the website, you need to speak to people who work in the industry or the company or a competitor so you can answer this with ease. Because if you can’t, you wont be going through to the second round. And make sure that you get the company name right.

Finally, I loved Alastair’s point about joining a tech start up when you’re young. As you get older you’re opportunities diminish as you get more responsibility and you find yourself shopping at Ikea at weekends. As he said, you will get amazing experience working at a start-up in which ever industry, it might not be the next Facebook, but your skills and things you will learn will stick with you throughout your career , and you’ve got the rest of your life to get a more boring job.

Right episode 9 done and dusted. You can find a full transcript of everything that we’ve talked about and all links at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/techstartup. Please get in touch with us on Twitter @gradjobpodcast, and also if you’ve enjoyed the show please leave a review on Itunes or Stitcher radio, we will love you forever and it also helps other people to find the show. Join us next week when we speak to Lis McGuire and cover the topic of how to create an amazing CV. I hope you enjoyed the episode today, but more importantly I hope you use it and apply it. See you next week.

1 comment on “Episode 9 – How to get a job with a tech start-up with Alastair Paterson”
  1. AndyGuptan says:
    February 19, 2015 at 11:24 pm

    Really enjoyed the episode, lots of useful advice. Daunting to think just how many people apply for each internship and how high the standard is. Keep up the good work!

    Reply

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