I believe that work becomes crushingly depleting if one does not have a cultural or interpersonal fit with one’s company and colleagues. A multi-stage interview process can help in figuring out the fit, but I think there is also an augmenting forum for that – student events hosted by companies. Embarrassingly enough, I must admit that during my studies I did not leverage these kinds of extracurricular activities as much as I could have. That is why I had to work twice as hard for finding out if the company was the cultural fit for me during my interviews. Luckily, it was a great fit.

I think only after the whole nine yards of several interview processes, I have started to appreciate the value which is in the student activities companies host for attracting talent. I see it as an ultimate arena of learning about the people and often seeing them as themselves, without any interviewer-interviewee power dynamics distorting the picture. To bring this into an even more positive light, I think that one can also learn new stuff and get into cool activities for free which can balance and bring contrast to the walls of the university library or the sticky floors of nightlife.

We at Reddal host a lot of different events for sharp students interested in business building such as case events, escape rooms, and mentoring sessions. Often the goal for us is to try to give the participants an idea of what it is like to work at Reddal and engage in plain old conversations with students. Very often these events are win-win, since I think it is always exciting to chat with people that have a fresh view of the world and enthusiasm to move forward in life.

I think the best way of doing student events is not by arranging a PowerPoint slide onslaught putting everyone to sleep halfway into the presentation but by creating a platform for students to talk to us peer to peer. I think we are doing the latter by engaging the participants of our events into interaction with us, often in terms of an activity or an interesting topic. Now, during the activity scarce time of the pandemic, sharing a delivered snack in video monitoring session can also do the trick.

A working relationship is like any other relationship one might have, and my view is that one should treat it as such and not rush into it. One should take a feel of the people and the culture first. In my opinion, at Reddal the prior matters especially since all of what we do takes place in teams, and our whole existence and competitive edge lays on, besides our unique business model, our effective teams full of bright people.