By Kerri Smyth, Talent Advocate at talent.io
After being at talent.io for almost 2 months, I had been waiting with great anticipation to attend our global onboarding program: Talent University!
Talent University was created by our Head of People and Culture, Julie Cristofari, in July 2018 and it’s a time when the 20 most recent newcomers from the Paris 🇫🇷, London 🇬🇧, Berlin 🇩🇪 and Amsterdam 🇳🇱 offices come together for two jam-packed and fun-filled days in Paris!
📚DAY ONE
We arrived at the talent.io office in Paris at 9am, welcomed with café & croissants ☕🥐 in typical French fashion and had a chance to meet other newcomers and catch up with those who were at the company retreat in Morocco this September.
In the morning, we heard from 2 of the 3 of the company founders, Jonathan and Nico, who spoke to us about how talent.io came to life, and where we hope to go in the future 🚀.
This first morning we had the opportunity to meet with several Leads from various teams, including Blandine & Florian for the Paris Business, and Edouard, Clementine & Ben from the Large Accounts and Expansion teams.
One of Talent University’s main goals is to give everyone a global overview of our international Business 🌍 so after lunch:
- Ivo, the Country Manager in Berlin, updated us on the activities, challenges & accomplishments of the German teams 🏆
- The Marketing team showed off all their wonderful efforts in the new product launch, the platform re-design & the new global video campaign 🎬 (check it out here if you haven’t already)
- Julie, our Head of People and Culture, touched on the 3 company values — Think Team, Make Impact and Take Ownership (which I think everyone can now confidently recite in their sleep 😉)
We finished off our first day in a Design Thinking workshop 💭 led by Amit, the third company founder.
Design Thinking is a process of solving problems and creating new and innovative ideas by Empathising, Defining, Ideating, Prototyping and Testing.
We took the example of the gift-giving process 🎁: everyone had to conduct interviews about giving gifts, synthesise this information, brainstorm ideas and create a prototype to present to the rest of the group.
The results were a collection of interesting and inspired solutions, from a Secret Santa app 🎅 to a microchip that stores memories and gift ideas 🧠. Much like at talent.io, in Design Thinking, no idea is a bad idea..in fact, the crazier the better!
📚DAY TWO
Everyone gathered once again in the Paris office space a little sleepier than the day before but just as eager 🤓!
We heard from:
- the Tech and Product teams, who walked us through the dev team’s most recent accomplishments and what they have planned for the months ahead 📲.
- Mandana from the Finance team explaining the ins and outs of what goes on behind the scenes, and
- Alison from the UK office about the scaling 📈 of our London team and the challenges that we are facing
The rest of the afternoon was spent in Part II of our Design Thinking workshop, where we were brainstorming how to 👇
‘Build a great environment at talent.io’ 💡
We worked in teams to gather information and brainstorm ideas around question statements before presenting our ideas to the 3 company founders, who shared their thoughts & feedback and elaborated on how implementing such ideas could be possible at talent.io.
After our two-day crash course to talent.io, everyone successfully graduated from Talent University with flying colours 🎓 and we all enjoyed a well-deserved soirée complete with wine, cheese & French games before continuing the celebrations into the early hours of the morning 💃.
Un grand merci to Julie and Charlotte for organising such a wonderful integration event for us newbies! We are now fully part of the talent.io team! 👏
Want to join a dynamic and growing company with great perks? 🚀 Interested in a collaborative and international team environment with the opportunity to take ownership and make an impact? 🌟
Check out the open opportunities at talent.io: https://careers.talent.io/ — we would love to hear from you!
