Ask HN: Why don't more UK graduates want to join start-ups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why don't more UK graduates want to join start-ups?

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Last May we organised a recruitment fair in London for UK hackers to meet local start-ups. YC companies included Lanyrd, Songkick, Tuxebo and Webmyd. It got more traction than we expected with hundreds of attendees. More details at www.siliconmilkroundabout.com

We announced a follow up event this Sunday that has had a strange response pattern. We've had thousands of registrations, but they're mostly from experienced developers rather than current students and recent graduates. My personal goal for the event is to help graduates see that there are more options out there than just the obvious banking/consulting/Google routes so I'm trying to make sure we also reach current students.

The event is free to attend, showcases 500+ roles at over 100 UK based start-ups from Mind Candy to Shazam but hasn't yet gotten real traction at universities across the UK despite hitting mailing lists, flyering etc.

Does anyone on hacker news have any ideas on how we could increase awareness of the event amongst current UK CS students? Do we have to take the event to campuses like the banks do with their milkrounds?

If you're a UK CS or engineering student have you heard about the event? If not what would have been the best way to reach you? What career options are more visible on campus (banks, Google etc)?

Thanks! Ian (co-founder Songkick)

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I'm a founder of Lyst, one of the companies who will be involved in the event. I have two theories about why the traction for so-to-be graduates hasn't been amazing.

1) Location. While London is definitely business and cultural center of Britain, I believe it's a bit of a slog for students to travel down to the recruitments fair, especially since most of the best universities are located outside of the city. SO going to them would definitely help.

2) Most of the companies pitching are relatively unknown to the general masses. My best hires are people who either approached us because they like why we're doing, or people in my professional circles. Professional developers fit nicely into these two buckets, were most students don't. Great companies like Tuxebo and Conversocial don't really have mass appeal. Subsequently, it's hard to get a student who doesn't truly understand the company/space excited about being a part of the team.

The second problem is even further exacerbated as early startups don't want "employees". They want "Employee #1"; someone who is passionate and ready to help push the company forward.

It's a tricky problem.

The second problem is even further exacerbated as early startups don't want "employees". They want "Employee #1"; someone who is passionate and ready to help push the company forward.

I'm in my senior year of college here in the US and this definitely nails it for me. I've had some solid internships where I've done actual coding / ops / etc, but I don't feel like I'm at the technical level where I could graduate and make huge impacts for a startup.

Are startups who are past the "Employee #1" phase (or even employees 2-5, I'd imagine) in a different position in regards to this? (ie more willing to bring on a recent grad, because they already have strong technical employees/leadership pushing the company forward)

My company is early stage still & we still have a very high bar for developers. That said, I hire based on a persons ability to perform, not the time they've been doing it.

If you have a github & portfolio that shows you can create, have an interest in what my company does, and can pitch it to me, I'd hire you.

Maybe this is something that many grads might not realize too, as it's quite different in contrast with hiring processes associated with Enterprise Company XYZ.

It's one of my favorite parts about startup culture in general, though. Whenever I hear people saying stuff like this (re: hiring performance vs experience) my first thought is almost always "where do I sign up?!"

Location is a good point. Never underestimate the laziness of students when it comes to transit. They're used to living in a village.

Or expense, including accommodation.

I think a lot of students just aren't aware it's possible... All through uni, literally zero people told me startups even existed as an option. No professor, no career counsellor, no guest speaker... nobody.

I accidentally signed up for a course called "project proposal" thinking it was about submitting research to conferences, but it was actually about pitching ideas to VCs. Rocked my world.

Although it wasn't quite what I imagine they were hoping for, I dropped out after that semester and have spent the last 5 years happily entrenched in startups.

My best guess would be that they do not know the option exists and/or they do not believe they can do it. It does and they can.

So spread the word!

Exactly, in my final year we'd be inundated by almost daily visits from the likes of KPMG, Logica, Accenture, Microsoft, HP, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank etc telling us why we should work for them.

I only realised that startups were an option after being embedded in the London tech community for a while.

Things like Silicon Milkroundabout http://siliconmilkroundabout.com/ and http://www.workinstartups.com/ are great, but I think they only work for people who are already interested in working in startups.

As a community we might need to start doing outreach to Universities and attending their careers fairs to really get the message out there.

Plus there is also the legacy fear that start-ups are a risk. Students aim for big companies and recognised brands as it's entrenched in their psyche that they must build a decent CV from the minute they step out into the big bad world.

I think that's somewhat mitigated as the UK develops a few more household name brand start-ups like Moshi Monsters and Shazam but I agree it's an issue.

I think the key point we need to make there is that as a developer you want to go wherever you'll learn the most, and start-ups credibly offer that - both by exposure to the broader aspects of building a successful business and also by density of talent.

I don't think you can call Moshi Monsters and Shazam a 'startup' anymore.

That was my experience too. I studied machine learning at Cambridge and didn't know a single person from my class or years above me doing anything other than a phd, joining microsoft research (who were aggressively for computer vision grads then) or joining a completely different field like management consultancy or banking. Looking back I would have loved to join Skype or Last.fm then, but had no idea that they were hiring for people like me.

+1 on the guest lecture point. UCL runs a guest lecture series with founders, but that's focused on business students. This could be shared with other departments like CS and Design.

A few guesses:

a) The likes of Morgan Stanley, PWC and suchlike put a lot of effort into always being at the forefront of student minds, by sponsoring societies, etc. That often means they are the default first choice. They also organise a ton of events to show students how nice they are.

b) Money. No getting away from this one. A decent starting salary might be in the region of 25k, the companies mentioned above usually pay somewhere around 35k. That 10k makes a huge difference after 3-4 years of living in squalor.

c) Inexperience. Coming out of university a job is more-or-less a job. You write some code, get paid, that's it. It takes a bit of personal experience to fully appreciate the corporate reality of legacy code, bureaucracy and incompetence. In my experience it often takes those encounters with the beast that is corporate coding to make you run for the hills or startups.

d) Peers and parental pressure. Your mates are all getting golden hand shakes and nice lunches at Big Corp, it is natural to want the same. Also, when you get that job offer from PWC or similar, your parents' eyes light up with excitement and they run off to tell all their friends about it. When you get a job at a three man company, their reaction is likely to be mild confusion at best. Sad but true.

As a soon-to-be graduate in Germany I can second all of your guesses. ANYONE I know is going to either join BigCorp Inc or staying at Uni. I had a feeling for a long time that that was not for me and I started looking into doing a startup. For now I am not ready so I am going to work for one, but I am really the odd one among my peers. Parents also think it's weird when you had this opportunity to work for a big name. So in Germany a lot of it is definitely cultural and perception, I imagine its similar in the UK.

These are all great points. On a) perhaps we need to use the milkroundabout brand to start sponsoring stuff during the year, similar to how the larger corporations do. On d) I totally agree with that. My main hack around that has been to try to have dinner with the parents/partners of those joining us to try to get them to buy into the opportunity and people behind the start-ups as well. That's also one area where in the UK, having brand name investors like YC and Index behind you really helps.

Definitely makes sense for milkroundabout to sponsor events and build awareness of startups in general. Individual startups don't have the resources and longevity to continuously be building awareness over the long term.

I've been really lucky, straight out of university I've managed to only work with startups. I've had the opportunity to work with a few startups to get them to a first release [I graduated and moved to Germany helping startups as a contractor].

But generally, working for startups isn't mentioned as an option to students at any point during their course. This is perhaps an issue with university faculty, they probably assume it's not an option since they don't have any contacts to any startups. Placing a call to Microsoft recruitment is easy.

Another reason might be an issue with the education students receive at university, I feel as if only 10 students out of a class of 120 people will know how to program correctly. Startups normally want people with lots of knowledge in many different areas, they don't want people who only know how to do certain things; Hiring a graduate who can only code HTML isn't normally an option for startups since they need the most out of the little money that have.

Until at least 50% of a graduating class are able to perform in multiple areas, backend, front-end, perhaps mobile in multiple languages (they don't have to know them amazingly well, but enough to program efficiently whilst checking documentation – when needed!), startups aren't really an option for most graduates. You would be amazed at how many students can't debug problems in their code, because they're taught to just copy code they find on the internet or on some sort of Blackboard style intranet app.

TL;DR: Students graduate with piss poor skills and until more students graduate with the needed skills, they'll never find themselves in a startup.

I'm a recent graduate and I attended the previous milkroundabout.

Let me start by saying that I've always hated recruitment fairs — you're treated like cattle and rarely get to speak to companies (read: HR departments) properly. I found it to be a similar situation with the milkroundabout event only instead of HR departments it was founders and developers.

I don't agree with "selling the brand" of milkroundabout as it will easily be confused with similarly named events/sites/companies. Instead aim to do guest lectures at universities on topics that are bound to get students interested.

If you're the ones with interesting work, why aren't you talking about what you do? Students already get told that they are under prepared for what working life is like and you can expose them to what you've done. You could easily compare this to what life was like at <insert safe boring company> before. If you're so inclined.

Pick topics that are interesting to the students that you want to attract. Then go on a tangent about start-ups, the culture, and the experience. If you show students what it's like to be in a start-up, they'll get involved and tell their friends.

In summary, sell them a better lifestyle than the usual suspects.

I'd be curious to hear how you found the last event? Our goal was that all the start-up booths would be staffed by developers at the start-ups, so you'd be able to find out what the culture and experience of their start-up was like, directly. Did that happen? Sounds like it was much like a typical recruitment fair for you, which is a failure on our part.

> Our goal was that all the start-up booths would be staffed by developers at the start-ups, so you'd be able to find out what the culture and experience of their start-up was like, directly.

Yes, but not as much as I'd like to. I found it far too easy to get stuck in a slow-moving crowd or just wait in a queue to talk.

In the end I just stayed by the bar near the bar staff and talked to developers as they went to grab a beer. It seemed to work better and the devs were far more relaxed talking with a beer in hand. Same goes for outside when they went to grab a cigarette.

When I left university I interviewed at a small company and a startup but in both cases they were just interviews for jobs I got through a recruitment consultant. That was all I knew of how to get a job. I think the problem is that recent graduates are unaware they could be doing anything other than looking at cwjobs and phoning a recruitment agency up.

Possibly timing is an issue, right before or after final exams may catch students when getting a job is more top of mind?

One other idea might be to organise some paid internships. If you have a large number of companies in willing to take interns on (point them to Joels 'smart and gets things done' if they want to see the benefits of getting smart people interested in their company before they leave education) then that may give the CS departments a reason to get undergraduates interested in a startup career.

Good luck with the event this weekend, it looks fantastic.

Paid summer internships is a smart point. Many of the companies exhibiting at the event are keen to having summer tech interns, and perhaps if we packaged that up better we'd get more engagement from university tutors. Maybe we should create a listing of all the summer internships available as well. Thanks for a helpful idea.

I think this would create a lot of interest in the start-up area. As part of my course there was a compulsory 6-month placement in industry. Most of the students were blissfully unaware of the start-up opportunities available, especially when the big players were dangling large money incentives and holding big promotion events. Also, if you took a typical internship with a bank, etc, the chances are that you got offered a graduate job. This in itself would prevent a lot of the students looking further for other opportunities even if they were being promoted.

The only time I even had a hint of the start-up world was the odd email from the career officer. (I actually remember the SongKick advert. I was really tempted to apply, even though you were just looking for a graduate position. In hindsight, I should have tried my luck :))

What would be useful in promoting the internships would be a start-up demo-day, where bunch of start-ups would come in and showcase their product/vision, development technologies, and any other 'cool stuff'.

Edit: To clarify, rather that a start-up fair, where students stumble about, the demo-day would be contained in a lecture room with a proper presentation and QA session. These types of events were always packed in uni.

Great feedback, thanks. I think some kind of on campus event is the next step and I love the idea of making it about product demos not standard booths.

I just looked and workinstartups.com has an interns section.

http://workinstartups.com/jobs/interns/

possibly you could work with them on this? They seem to be UK based/focused.

I'm currently a student (in Holland), and I've been to a few recruitment fairs and if I were to get an email or see a flyer about another one I would probably not even read it. Most recruitment fairs are just terrible. Companies will send the prettiest girls they can find in their HR and PR departments with the sole goal of getting your contact info plus some buzzwords so they can add those to their database. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against pretty girls, but they're not actually interested in me as a person nor do they have a lot of knowledge about the company which usually makes recruitment fairs a big waste of time.

On campus presentations on the other hand are a fantastic way of putting yourself on the radar. I don't mean the recruitment fairs that some Uni's will have on campus, but rather smaller events. I recently went to the final presentation of a phd project and there were 4-5 companies giving a short talk what they did in that field and afterwards they had stands with demos and the actual people who get their hands dirty were there to talk to you (extensively). To me the latter (where it's directly related to a topic I might be interested in) is much more interesting and inspiring than some impersonal recruitment fair.

Great post! I'm an MSc Tech Entrepreneurship student with a software background and would either join an existing startup or launch my own. I'm actually attending the silicon milkroundabout event this Sunday.

I can relate to the problem in the following ways:

(1) Culture - The UK and Europe in general does not have the same 'entrepreneurship spirit' like they do in the US. The vast majority are looking for stability, rather than risk and rewards (both personal and financial). A recent article published in the telegraph stated that my university (UCL), has the highest number of graduates going into self-employment, and the figure was still just 2.4%, so you can imagine the rest. http://tgr.ph/tTMHaJ

(2) Value - There not so many people from a software background in my course (around 10%), so I tried to reach out to undergraduate Computer Science students in the same department in order to organise something similar to the silicon milkroundabout, but just for students on campus, i.e. match up budding tech entrepreneurs with developers and aspiring hackers. We received less than 3% interest, which kind of reflects the newspaper figure. I don't think they see the value of joining a start-up at the early stage. http://econ.st/uOw02e

(3) Presence - In the last few months, even though the term has just started I’ve received a lot of emails about recruitment fairs on campus with banks, financial institutions, large corporate IT companies etc. These are normally oversubscribed and I'm sure a lot of these graduates will end up in those companies, as they are recruited whilst still in their final year. Perhaps finance might be a factor as well. A lot of people can’t afford to work for ‘shares and equity’ after graduating with thousands of pounds in student debts, they would rather clear or reduce those as quickly as possible.

So, I would say, if you want to get more students taking part rather than established developers, you would need to come to campus and organise events there. Maybe do a tour around UK universities. Someone I met at a recent techmeetups event is actually founding a startup that teaches kids in school how to write python code. If they start early they are more likely to do it out of interest, rather than to get a secure job with a bank.

I'm currently a masters student at UCL and I'm too surprised at the small scale of start-up culture here. I've been talking to many london universities to bring hackers and start-up enthusiasts together to collaborate and see what everyone is working on. Numbers are small, but there is talent out there working on cool ideas.

In my opinon in this case it's a matter of exposure, here at UCL I didn't see any advertisements about siliconmilkroundabout; and I bet more non-technical founders knew about it than computer scientists. Universities are a hard one to crack, you really have to target down hard to the societies(techsoc) and the right areas (malet place).

what could we do in the next 3 days to really crank up awareness at UCL? We have posters, fliers and can send someone from Songkick or another start-up down to speak about the event and the start-ups that will be represented. Thanks!

Yeah highly recommend on sending some cool figures down or arrange a presentation, although if you have 3 days maybe too late.

If you email me at gbfjcaeakq@mailinator.com (temporary email address) i can put you in contact with head of techsoc.

I'm sure some guys at the UCL Hatchery would be willing to help spread the word too. Email me at smile@saintsal.com and I'll put you guys in touch.

will do, thanks

Ian,

I currently work at onefinestay, one of the attendees at milkroundabout. (I am the one that has been feeding @milkroundabout with some 'reasons why you should work in startups' via Tiff Philippou)

I came to the company from KPMG, having spent 4 years 'earning' my ACA. Those 4 years would have been far better spent learning the operational and technical ropes at a start up but it did give me an understanding of finance and all it entails.

I agree with a number of opinions below that might stifle traction - peer expectation of job/employer/salary, lack of visibility of start ups, location of the Milkroundabout. (Could there be mini satellite events linked by webcasts/interactive discussion boards/MMOG type virtual event?)

But a key one is simply 'What can I/would I do?' Large multinationals have very defined learning and career paths usually linked to professional qualifications that, theoretically at least, will give them at platform in this uncertain world. Start ups offer no standard day/week/year which is their greatest selling point (to those who have tasted corporate life!) but can be daunting for those fresh out of a structured school system. Also for non CS grads - what roles are available to them that they can research prior to graduating.....

There might be an opportunity to develop a learning framework that encompasses the necessary skills that 'Start ups' require and provide support to these new joiners as well as more information from recent employees as to their back ground and current role.

Jed

jed(dot)comyn(At)onfinestay(dot)com

I think your idea is superb, but your website would be better if there was a way to search through all the available jobs to see if there is anything in particular of interest.

For instance, it would be useful to be able to see which funded companies were looking for a junior designer and then be able to look at the actual job postings themselves (e.g. via link to that company's website).

I hope you have great success with this event. I have a friend attending and there's a good chance I will come down from Leeds one day to take a look at one of your future events.

I've been looking through the website since the second rounds was announced and I think that the companies should all be tagged with what field they do stuff in and what technologies they use. For example Eduvee.com, I can see what they do but not whether they use Ruby, Python, or PHP.

And relevant to this thread. You should get the companies that want to take on Graduates to have a big 'Graduate Wanted' flag!

Thanks for the feedback. We'll consider adding a list of all available jobs, that's a good idea.

Re Leeds - how did your friend who is coming hear about the event? Are there email lists that we should have targeted that we didn't?

When I lived in Leeds I used to attend the Open Coffee meetings (monthly) and the BarCamps (annually), where people would talk about start-ups and start-up events, so you could target these meetings (if they are still going). I doubt you could target students directly without appearing to be spammers.

You (perhaps collectively with other roundabouters) could try holding some sort of competition for students. I am sure academics at universities would help to promote something like that to their students and you would be able to see which students are capable of building things and getting things done, i.e. which are potential hires. It could also expose students to the types of work, and the style of working, that occurs at a start-up.

My friend moved to London from Leeds and works for a design company somewhere near the roundabout.

I'm not aware of any groups up here in Leeds that meet regularly and cater for hackers interested in working for a startup.

I've been to a couple of talks/beers with the local Linux User Group but I do miss the opportunity to talk about things a bit more web- or startup-specific.

I hear you guys have a bit of an after-work drinking scene going on down there and I'm jealous!

Hi Ian

Firstly kudos on your patience and determination with Silicon Milk Roundabout. I've been a remote admirer of the project and I hope at some point I'll be able to engage more directly with the project, not least when it comes to our (www.kayako.com) own hiring. Silicon Roundabout and everything else associated with it is something I feel strongly about.

As far as reaching out to CS and engineering (etc) soon-to-be-graduates, have you been in touch with computer science and engineering faculties in universities, making an introduction and asking for them to send an email out to students?

Even easier would be to contact the social/ents society for the CS department/engineering faculties. Those societies will be more willing to send an email blast about careers events like these.

For example: http://cssbristol.co.uk/ http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/societies/COGS/ http://www.cs-society.co.uk/site/

Another idea might be the British Computer Society. They have a Young Professionals Group (I've posted about SMR to the LinkedIn group), and the main body of BCS would probably be more than happy to help with promotion.

Hope this helps and apologies if it was all already obvious and tried.

Edit: Seems I am late with a couple of those suggestions. Oh well, I'll keep thinking.

Thinking out loud... I think one of the problems is that on-campus careers events feel like bubbles. There isn't an obvious incentive for undergrads outside of London to travel to the event.

Some kind of representation at Universities themselves would solve this. Whether that is a small presence at a careers fair representing an annual SMR event in London, or perhaps (even better) a visiting speaker from a startup telling their startup story and to promote the actual idea of working for a startup.

As others before me have suggested, I think the barrier to getting students to the event isn't just about event logistics and promotion, but about culture and perceptions about startups too.

Does the startup route even cross their mind to begin with?

This may be a bit of quiet topic now but I still thought I'd throw in my comments.

I interned at a start up in my penultimate year and it was both a great experience, and I got paid (not a lot, but enough). I got to learn about business practices quickly, I did some meaningful work and contributed towards several products, we practised agile methods and it was all round a good experience. There was, however, more legacy code here than I've had to deal with before.

In my final year I started applying to more start ups (in London this time), and got offers from a number of them, I didn't take any of them. Why? They all wanted me to work for free. Working for free in central London? I don't need the experience of an unknown company that bad (harsh CV reality).

So I instead did the usual and got a (well paying) internship at a big bank. I had a great time, didn't run into very much legacy code, worked with lots of very cool, and very new, technologies, and learnt a lot about technology and business. It didn't take much consideration when deciding to take their job offer afterwards, turning down my MSc offers.

The kind of work I was going to be doing from day one mattered a lot to me, and it didn't seem to be much of a comparison. There just really wasn't much to entice me into a startup again.

Hi Guys,

I'm a recent grad (just over 2 years ago now) and I have a startup in the UK. I'll be honest this is the first time I've heard about the event.

I think grads / final years are even more scared now than ever about finding a job and while that makes it a perfect time to try and start you own thing, I worry it just adds even more risk to a what they feel is already a dismal employment situation.

At Bath Uni we had an excellent Career's service however and if you wanted to do campus events or even just mailers, I would recommend getting in touch with university career centres. You can even ask them to pass your details on to the CS department and getting them the mail the event (yes, spam in a way) it to all the CS students. They did that at Bath if it was particularly relevant.

It may just be a case of students getting tired of all these career fairs which often don't amount to anything. I know in my final year, by the time I'd seen KPMG/Accenture/Deloitte/Barclays/BT/HP/etc I couldn't take any more being deceived about "fantastic opportunities". Perhaps posting this question to HN and undertaking some Twitter buzz if you can will attract the right sort of people to your event more than career emails.

Anyway, good luck with the event! Great that these things even happen in the UK, Rob

Have you contacted universities directly? I studied at the University of Birmingham and they had a named contact for getting in touch with students. That person often forwarded relevant communication (job opportunities, recruitment events) to us and I took my first job based on one of those emails.

I agree with robfitz that people don't talk about startups. The companies that do the milkround are the usual suspects. Accenture, Deloitte, Procter and Gamble etc...

We've reached out to a ton of university career services and CS & engineering departments. Some have been very helpful, for example the team at Queen Mary have been amazing and probably 50% of their CS students are coming down. But many of the others have been a lot less engaged and willing to promote to their student body, vs the tried and tested options of banks & consultancies.

Do you think we should take the siliconmilkroundabout on tour? I'm wondering if part of the issue is that we don't have our own stall alongside the usual suspects you name.

That's great - shame on the others for not passing it on.

Clearly the big boys visit universities because they have the resources to do so. If siliconmilkroundabout were to visit on behalf of a body of startups this would clearly be more efficient than every startup trying to send one man. I'd love to see this happen and I think it would have a huge impact on students, especially given the contrast with other visitors. How it is funded would be an issue and perhaps donors would see their company specifically promoted but I think that can be worked out.

I think we'll start looking into it. Should be possible. Maybe create a rota scheme where a couple of founders staff each table which would allow us to hit hundreds of milkround events over a year.

> We've reached out to a ton of university career services and CS & engineering departments. Some have been very helpful, for example the team at Queen Mary have been amazing and probably 50% of their CS students are coming down. But many of the others have been a lot less engaged and willing to promote to their student body, vs the tried and tested options of banks & consultancies.

If the "official" university authorities refuse to engage, go through the student societies.

Great idea on touring, there's a probably a non-student-stereotypical type reason why banks/companies come to the students, instead of the other way round. Good opportunity to bring awareness to the start-up world

A good discussion.

There are a variety of reasons as to why this occurs, particularly in the uk. The most prominent is the lack of awareness of joining a start-up as an achievable or even applicable career option.

NACUE, the business which I work on, encompasses a network of 40,000 enterprising students. And our biggest barrier is enabling students and grads to understand that are different modes of being entrepreneurial post graduation, and therefore 3 career options: 1. Launching a company 2. Being entrepreneurial whilst working for one of the big boys - an intrapreneur 3. Joining a start-up team

The third has the greatest potential. Given the thriving start-up community in London and others areas, and still, the record graduate unemployment.

We're working on raising the awareness of the above problem. Looking to launch a programme next year - this can hopefully tie into the milkround.

Lastly, I don't think you need to be on campus. What we all need is to be visible, and that is achieved through networks (i.e. ADCAS, EEUK) and online, social media - that's where they're engaged.

I've promoted this across network - have a good one this weekend. Also, based in Old Street if you want to share some ideas.

Hushpreet

I've registered for the event this year but I graduated in '05 in CS/IS so I guess I match the pattern you have been seeing.

When I graduated I barely knew that startups existed and I certainly didn't know they needed grads.

I went to a Uni that had an associated business park and those companies advertised on the student job board.

I did a graduate scheme with one of those companies but I wish I'd had more exposure to startups and associated events.

Is there a central list of these 500+ roles? Not so people can apply but so students know before hand that they are suited to the positions.

Maybe it's the nature of CS students, it's a pretty daunting time - especially meeting recruiting companies face to face. It's hard to know what to say for yourself if all you've got is a degree in hand.

For the average grads it feels like the competition would be just way to high.

With a few years of work experience it's much easier to go and chat to recruiters as you've got confidence in the projects you've worked on.

I don't know if any of the roles at the event will be suited to me this Sunday but I'm going anyway because I'd love to talk to some of the companies that are there.

I don't think I would have done that as a grad.

look forward to hopefully meeting you on sunday and would love any feedback you have on how it goes for you.

I think the idea of a central list is a good one, and others have suggested that too.

Hi Ian, I'm a 2nd year CS student at the University of Bristol. Out of everyone I know on the course, I'm the only one that regularly reads HN/Techcrunch and has an interest in start-ups; it's also how I found out about siliconmilkroundabout.

The start-up path isn't at all prominent here and I think there's a few reasons for this: Lack of presence of start-ups at recruitment/careers fairs (it's all the big names). The compulsory Hi-Tech units on the course aren't done right - hours of lectures filled with slides rather than guest speakers from start-ups, case studies, or any interactive processes whatsoever. Little to no communication between start-ups and students (groups or individuals) using social media or otherwise. Everyone sees messages posted on our CS FB group but nobody really reads the emails sent through the CS HR.

I think your best bet is to communicate directly with Society heads (i.e. students) such as Computer Science society or entrepreneurship society and to organise some guest speaker events. Lastly I think it's really important for students to know how they can help your start-up - specifically what skills they would need and what they would learn as well.

Ian, I think it comes down to the fact that graduates here in London and the rest of the UK aren't all that interested in startups as a whole. Having studied at a top London uni and having friends doing CS degrees at Imperial, UCL etc, none of them even considered joining a startup. It seems as though all of these graduates have their heart set on joining investment banking/trading - this is largely based on what they think the job is like, but after they join, they realise it sucks but the money is pretty good they just put up with it. This is based on 10+ of my friends working in banking and hating the hours and the work.

We need to foster more of a startup culture within university campuses, right now 99% of graduates don't even think about joining a startup - it just doesn't even come into their mind, totally focused on joining a blue chip.

Finally, many (not all!) of the startups here in London don't even have a proper business model and haven't made a profit despite being established for years. So that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the top CS graduates they hope to attract.

I'll ask a question or three back at you. Why do you want graduates to work at startups? Why do you think this is a desirable thing to champion?

I've just been looking at one of your companies (http://www.entrepreneurfirst.org.uk) which has a free entreppreneurship course for final year students and recent grads (2 years). And I have friend who's been working for 3 years and was recently knocked back for a role because she had passed the 2 year recent grad mark and was therefore unsuitable.

So there seems to be a mindset that society must mold students in a certain way and force them in certain directions perhaps before they are ready? And if they take a few more years to become ready then they must now be treated differently.

I guess my final question is, 'Are you sure that you're not making a mistake by singleing out students'?

It also might be worth getting in touch with Student Unions as some students might have entrepreneur societies that have final years that would be interested. As well as Math and Computer societies.

Generally I've found that the Unions might be more willing to spread the word to the students than the universities.

We've hit quite a few entrepreneur societies but not really student unions. We'll look into that. Thanks.

No doubt the attraction of big companies is strong for grads, and for good reasons. A positive observation is that post-grad Entrepreneurship programs attract a lot of people who went straight to big companies and then figured out that startups were a better option for them. So grads who get it just take a year or 3 to become aware of the option.

I wonder if the answer lies with these recent alumni, and if there's a way to share their experience with the doey-eyed undergrads job-seekers.

Maybe Milkroundabout needs to bring it into the schools, and enable alumni as the awareness vector. Or maybe Milkroundabout could turn some attention to rescuing former grads already employed at big companies, rather than focusing solely on the newest grads.

I think many of the current registrants (of which there are thousands) are people who are 1-5 years into their career post uni and are realising they maybe went in the wrong direction by joining a bank/microsoft etc. So we're actually doing a good job of reaching that community.

I really like the idea of using alumni as an awareness vector.

I think there's a couple of issues. First, there's probably a bias on the part of graduates to take a job with what they perceive to be a safe, secure company that will look good on their CV. I think that tendency is a cultural thing here in the UK - there's more of a tendency for people here to work for companies for their entire career and, hence, there's traditionally been a cachet attached to working for big companies. That's something that's likely to change over time, though.

Another factor is likely to be a bias on the part of universities towards building relationships with larger employers who are seen as prestigious. An unheard-of startup won't garner anywhere near the interest and attention of a large, well-known company.

Are you working with uni staff to get the word out? Staff at programmes like http://www.ucl.ac.uk/msi/study/technology-entrepreneurship would probably be keen to promote it.

We are, and have contacted a large number of list moderators for careers/CS/entrepreneurship etc. I'll double check if we have reached out to that one. Thanks

Nowadays unis get ranked partly on what % of their grads are in employment x number of months after graduating, so its important to them to get graduates placed in jobs. I've come across a Computer Science department having a careers contact, who emails out vacancies to students. Maybe you might get somewhere by contacting unis and trying to get these careers contacts? (assuming a few of them do this?)

I was a business graduate (Nottingham) & we were never pitched startups either.

I was very willing to join a startup, but I also tend to rail against the Silicon Roundabout. I'm just personally not that interested in London.

Are many of these companies based elsewhere?

It's funny because something like this would do very well with Nottingham students. The dedicated business campus also has many computer science students, but we really only ever heard of the usual companies.

Have you looked at the Institute for Enterprise and Innovation on the Nottingham Business Campus, for example?

For this event, all the start-ups are London based, but there's no reason this couldn't be replicated nicely at Nottingham and other emerging UK start-up hubs

Keep an eye on Notts Tuesday as mentioned and pop along to one of the meetups at Antenna in town, a lot of startups attend.

For Nottingham related events, google "Nott Tuesday"

A pet hate of mine - the companies page just has a list of icons. Put a short mission statement next to each so people don't have to click through to a hundred different websites just to find out if they are interested.

Good feedback. We are distributing a document to all who register with more details on each company & their roles prior to the event.

It would be interesting to have some feedback from startups as well. Have they got many hires from the first fair? What kind of hires?

My intuition is that, on one hand, most graduates do not meet expectations of startups. A startup needs exceptional people to push technology forward. On the other hand, startups presented at the fair do not meet expectations of potential employees. They are not "cool enough". (I registered for the event in May but after looking at the list of companies decided that it was not worth trouble going from Oxford to London.)

Imperial College academic here. I haven't seen any fliers or posters around college today so this might have something to do with your lack of uptake. This is in contrast to the event you had earlier in the year which was prominently advertised around the place.

Also I noticed there is a careers fair happening today, predominantly big engineering firms/consultancies/banking, and I didn't see if you had any representation there (apologies if you do and I missed it).

Sean - thanks very much for stepping in and for the suggestions. We can send some people along to the careers fair today but have also fliered over the college. In general Imperial Careers have not been very responsive so perhaps there's a CS focused liaison we should be talking to instead? Thanks

May sound weird, but don't forget the Job Centre. I got a previous job at a startup via the Job Centre. My employers hadn't thought of advertising there until Business Link or some entreprisey support place like that suggested it. They've got a good job search facility. Don't think it costs anything to advertise a job there. People mistakenly think people only go there to collect dole but actually it is a place to look for a job too!

Why focus on just CS and engineering degrees? I was a Physics student, knew more about code than some CS undergrads and wasn't alone in that regard. You'll also find a lot of generally smart people who you can teach to code here.

I'll second the point many have made about money. It's hard to resist one of the big banks offering you £40k+ straight out of university.

I probably sound like a broken record on HN, but this is surely a big part of the problem - living costs in London. Even £40k doesn't give a great standard of living in London, due to ridiculous accommodation and transport costs. I think that startups should locate somewhere much cheaper but still attractive to grads, somewhere north. Examples - Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle.

>Even £40k doesn't give a great standard of living in London

That all depends on your definition of "great standard of living". I started out on £20k and have never felt that I was slumming it in London.

Fair point. My personal definition of a reasonable living standard, is being able to save a house deposit and eventually buy a 2-up 2-down terraced house, without forgoing all social life or basic no frills holidays. Such as house costs £70-80k in a cheap part of a northern city, £120k in a more up-market part, and, as for London, well maybe its under £300k on the very last stop on a tube line - Morden for example. In London you're likely to end up in a shared apartment for years. It might be a nice apartment, with good housemates, but it'll never be yours, and what happens when you get married and have kids? Lots of people answer "well then I move a 45 min train ride away". My other definition of decent standard of living involves not paying out thousands of £ to catch a stressful crowded train every day. ;)

This event was advertised on campus at UCL, but not specifically within the CS department. We received an email through JobOnline, but that's a service which you have to sign up to.

I have just sent out an email to all students in the Computer Science department; there were also flyers in the Engineering Cafe here which is the main hub for technical students.

as a vaguely recent graduate, and living in london, I was surprised that I hadn't heard of this until I read it here on HN.

Also (and this is totally personal) the Brick Lane location would have put me off a) because it's the other side of London, but mainly b) I have always perceived brick lane (and there abouts) as a London counter-culture/socialism/arty/etc scene, and events there abouts tend to follow that stereo type (for example look at the difference between the New Designers (http://www.newdesigners.com/) show and Free Range(http://www.free-range.org.uk/)). I have no problem with that now, but straight out of uni I was obsessed by money and one thing that a brick lane location doesn't scream to the high heavens is just that: money...

Hey,guys,I'm moving to London in a couple of weeks and would like to ask you some questions about UCL/Imperial and the startup scene in general.Is there some relevant forum(not studentroom.co.uk)? If not,due to lack of PM system on YC,if any of you replies to my email anton_92@live.com,would appreciate it.Thank you

I have only just heard about this event and only because a friend sent me this article on twitter. I have had a quick search but can't find any accounts for this event on twitter. If you guys had an account you could send us details on there then with one retweet, all my coursemates would know about it.

We have set up a twitter about the event, and would love if you could help retweet it to your coursemates. It's here: http://twitter.com/#!/milkroundabout

Which university are you currently studying at, and outside of twitter, what would have been the best way to help make you and your classmates aware of the event?

I have recently finished at Brighton university and so me and my mates are all looking for jobs. Other companies in the past have got students to promote for them, posting on the university intranet, facebook groups etc. I can't make this event but I hope you do another.

It might be a good idea to organize a brainstorming event to figure out how to attract more students/graduates to startups. When I worked in the financial industry I was involved in running grad recruitment schemes, so I'd be happy to chip in.

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