Why I joined Patch: How Work Near Home can help career-starters

It is not an easy time to find a job and remote work can be especially challenging for young people entering the workforce. Work Near Home offers a future with more balance and opportunities for connection for young people. Ella Cheney reflects on her recent move to join the team at Patch.

Entering the unknown

Coming out of university and into the world of work without the comfort of heading back to university in a few months can be intimidating. This year has been punctuated by continual stories from friends of never-ending rejections from painfully long application processes that all seem to involve being interviewed by a webcam.

The difficulty in getting a job as a graduate during the pandemic has created a strange new mantra requiring students to aim for 100 rejections rather than acceptances. LinkedIn is becoming increasingly littered with posts of job rejections, in the attempt of creating an atmosphere less of faux success but more comforting realism.

The fact remains that the level of hoop-jumping demanded from career-starters in the market for a job resembles a job in itself.

By comparison I feel as though I somewhat cheated the system. I had two calls with the founder of Patch before accepting an offer. We spoke about the future of work and the exciting role that technology would play in levelling up towns as hubs of commerce and activity.

We talked about the covid-related renaissance in local connection and how working near home could be a lifeline for parents exhausted from homeschooling their kids but equally exhausted by the prospect of a commute.

It was less an interview and more a brainstorming session. I came away from our conversations with pages of notes and ideas, excited by the prospect of being involved in shaping the future of work.

Going with my gut

Upon reflection, this onboarding process was little short of radical. Conventional wisdom suggests that interviews are supposed to be nerve-wracking. Where hundreds often vie for the same positions, they are supposed to work as a filtering system, testing every aspect of your potential, attitude and cultural fit. It is an exhausting process.

I did not feel relief at finding a job, but an itch to get started. Creating an informal onboarding environment felt like tipping recruitment on its head, a storyboarded employee journey that recognised the starting point as first contact with Patch versus a first day.

My decision to join Patch was as much driven by this experience as the company’s goals. Joining a startup is, as James Mitra says, as much a question of the company values as the boss’s.

At an early stage startup, where company culture is most fragile, the treatment of junior employees is pivotal in the creation and instilment of company values.

It is an old worn out cliché that well treated employees create amazing customer service, but it nevertheless rings true. Employees that embody company values help other employees work better towards company goals and lend authenticity to companies in customer service.

You are what you value

Companies that prioritise values internally are ultimately more likely to see those values progress in their broader community. It follows that a company vying to change the world of work must itself have a radically different approach to its workforce.

The question for Patch is how we create spaces that imbue values of balance and connectivity across diverse teams and individuals in Patches across the country rather than just our own team.

The decade-worth of innovation that the pandemic has ushered in has almost wholly been about work. Many have leapt into wildly new industries and roles, others have discovered whole new ways of working they had always been told were terrible.

As the pandemic has shifted our priorities towards what is most important, the question of “where do I want to work?” is increasingly becoming “how do I want to work and what impact do I want to make?”.

Where to go from here

The Work Near Home vision is an opportunity to be part of redefining work, creating a new balance between work and home without commutes or a lack of work home separation.

Co-working spaces in local communities have so much more potential than just a desk, they are opportunities to create hubs of community and shift our work lives away from our laptop screens towards human connection and connection with our local areas.

For those of us just starting out in the workforce, remote work can be particularly challenging. We often work where we sleep from small desks in shared houses and we don’t have existing work networks to rely on for connection or professional development.

A Work Near Home vision offers the benefits of remote work for young people while also offering distance from crowded spaces, separation from life and, most importantly, the opportunity to create community at work.

My hope is that Patch will go even further than this, carving a role in youth mentorship and creating talent hubs for young people to connect with role models in their local communities in industries beyond their immediate networks.

A role in improving access to great opportunities for amazing young people in smaller communities, and, hopefully, the death of the webcam interview.