mindmap

10 Minutes to get a job - mindmap-based live presentation 🕙

10 minutes to get a job, by 42

42 recently launched a series of conferences named “10 Minutes to get a job”, the title is a little bit counter-intuitive, because, the 10 minutes hard-limit is for the organization presenting its activities; the students have all the time they need after the presentations, with some fresh foods and drinks.

This series of conferences is very successful, a lot of students looking for a job (or just curious) are coming in the room for the presentation, and a lot more are coming for the buffet after (not sure about the motivation for these ones). 😄

Berty’s first public presentation

It was something totally new for the Berty team, the first time we talk about the project publicly, and as the project is still under development, we selected pieces of information that can be shared and that are is relevant and “sexy” for the students.

With the constraints of “10 minutes”, we made the choice of using preparing a mind-map with facts, no phrases, no images, and then I made the presentation by going word by word, and by expanding each mind-map folder’s.

It’s a little bit more complicated than a more standard conference, as I have to concurrently speak at the microphone, read the slide, move the zoomed map, expand folders, and everything in less than 10 minutes. Luckily, I made it in 9:55s and the organizer allowed one question from the audience.

The cool thing about this mind-map based conference is that at the end, there is only one slide, containing all the pieces of information and that everyone physically (and intellectually) present at that time should be able to explain again.

One slide is practical to capture with a smartphone, and this slide contains everything; this advantage is really cool and I think that I will use this technique again when I don’t need to focus on a specific topic.

Improvements

I was very concentrated with the data that I totally forgot a lot of details :)

Personal notes for later:

• Put at least my name, somewhere on the slide :)
• Say who I am when I start talking
• Don’t forget to add contact instructions

The buffet

I met 15 students, and my colleagues, Alex and Gody also met additional ones.

I was really happy to receive feedbacks from the students about the effectiveness of this style of presentation.

It was straight to the point, I like it

or

It was intense, I received a lot of motivational information, I want to know more now

My colleagues told me that a student asked her:

How are you so much energized, it’s impressive to feel so much energy

After the event

I made a lot of mistakes during the presentation and the preparation, but we also made some after :)

First, we forgot to create a job’s specific email address, it was fastly fixed, and the dedicated address (42@berty.tech) was shared to the students by the 42 staff (thank you Virginie!).

Why we attended this event?

Technically, we are not in the hurry of hiring anyone, but Alex and I, recently finished to read “Who”, and we decided to follow the concept of meeting people continuously, maintain a list of people with their talents, and contact them the day we are in the hurry of hiring someone.

Who: The A Method for Hiring

Geoff Smart, Randy Street

Additionally, we are also open to “the perfect match”, and last but not least, I’m often solicited by other friends and CEOs of the startups I audit, so it’s always useful to take some time to meet motivated students, speak with them,

Berty’s scorecards

Even if we are not actively looking for a position, we made the exercise of defining what kind of profile would make the difference enough to hire someone right now.

We formatted our job offers as “Scorecards”, which is the method suggested in “Who”.

See Berty’s Scorecards (work-in-progress).