Career/Recruitment

The candidate pool has increased considerably over the past few months due to the credit crunch. As many of you may be looking for a new job, I wanted to remind you of a piece of advice I wrote about a while back. Whether you are looking to work at Lab49 or anywhere else, please keep in mind that most interviewers want you to get the job! They want you to do well in the interview and so, should, do their utmost to make you feel comfortable.

In some companies, interviews can seem somewhat nerve wracking because the interviewer does little to ease the candidates nerves. This can be due things such as looming project deadlines that leaves them little time to speak with you, the interviewer may be inexperienced and so over-compensates by coming across as overly assertive rather than confident. My point being, it’s not generally going to be an issue with your candidacy. Sure, it’s certainly NOT a good thing that some interviewers are this way as they, to the candidate, are the “face” of the company and so should do all that they can to attract you to the organisation.

Let me make this offer to you. If you are preparing for an interview (whether it’s with Lab49 or not), feel free to drop me a email with any questions about how to handle interviews/interviewers and I will do all that I can to help you in your preparations.

As you are no doubt aware, the so-called “credit crunch” has had a significant impact on the world’s economies. Gordon Brown says that the UK situation is “containable” but the US economy is teetering on recession due to the fall-out from the sub-prime problems.

A good deal of staff from the big banks are getting laid off in both London and New York and are no doubt finding that there are slim pickings within the financial world. It goes to show that working in a large company does not necessarily protect you from the economic turmoil that is currently being faced. Lab49 has always been conservative in its growth and expansion into other countries and quite rightly so. Sure, we’re not a huge company BUT we are run very very cleverly and with some smart thinking and careful recruitment, we will continue to grow and expand in the current climate.

Our company was actually started in New York in 2002. As a financially-focussed technical company, I’m sure alot of people wondered what on earth our founders were doing given the economic fall out from the events of the 11th of September 2001. However, Lab49 was not only established in that tricky time, we actually grew too.

My message to those technologists who are looking for a new role; don’t discount smaller companies or consulting; we’re strong, we’re smart and we’re committed - why not contact our recruitment teams to find out more?

So the .NET Meetup is tonight from 6:30pm at the Lab offices. We are very pleased to welcome Mike Culver from Amazon as tonights guest speaker. Please try to find the time to come along - it’s going to be a really cool event.

The best way to get a real flavour for what a company is like to work for is by speaking with its employees but ONLY if those employees feel able to say how things truly are and what they truly think. You can get a really good idea of our culture by looking at the Lab49 blogs but being able to ask open questions of an employee would, I would hope, enthuse you about our company and give you an accurate idea as to what life is like here as a technologist.

You can actually do this whether you know a Lab49′er personally or not. Most of our staff, as you can see, have blogs and you are able to contact most staff via those blogs. If you’re interested in what one of my colleagues has to say and you like the cut of their jib, why not ask them about what they do here and what it’s like to work here? The people we employee are decent, open and honest people - they’ll tell you were we excel and where we don’t (the key to the second part of that is that we carry out frequent one-to-one meet ups to find out where we are going wrong and then make the necessary changes).

So, if you are interested in working with us but want more information before making any form of commitment to us, contact a Lab49′er. They’ll tell it like it is!

I am finding that some candidates are really focussed on contracting at present. I understand that the variety of project and great pay are a real draw but imagine working for a company that provides not only that but also offers career development, training and most importantly, a sense of camaraderie and team spirit.

Working independently certainly has its benefits but the power of the team is surely far stronger IF that team works coherently and effectively; if they share a common goal and focus. The combination of the interpersonal skills and technical skills of our teams create some groundbreaking and amazing applications and truly meet the needs of our clients. We share the same goal and vision which enables us the meet and exceed those requirements. We often see such qualities more effectively illustrated in nature; take a look at this video which truly illustrates the awesome power of teamwork when up against a seemingly unachieveable goal.

We’re looking for a User Experience Consultant to join our growing team. Whilst we hope that the users of our systems do not want pink and sparkly screens, you never know! We’d like for you to have some Photoshop and Wire Framing experience and to have great communication skills so that you can talk and LISTEN to users to get an understanding of what they’re after.

If you’d like to learn more, feel free to contact our London recruiting team via email: marie.downes@lab49.com, via telephone: 020 7248 9499 or via GoogleTalk: lab49careers

I’ll be blogging over the next few days as to other vacancies that we have so watch this space.

Lab49 are hosting another .NET meetup for those who are using and/or are interested in .NET and peripheral technologies. We’re going to be holding the event at our offices, address as below and have arranged for Mike Culver from Amazon Web Services to present at the event on the 3rd of April. We’ll provide the beer and food.

We’ll have details of the next event and guest speaker very shortly.

Now to me, AJAX is a smelly powder-based, abrasive cleaner available in the UK. Not only that, it’s what my dad scrubbed my brother and I with when we broke into the garage and painted each other with emulsion paint when we were about 4 and 5

So now, after 25 years of AJAX avoidance, I’m now actively seeking it out. Some of Lab49’s London team are about to start work on a first generation Silverlight project using AJAX. As you’ve no doubt seen from my colleagues blogs, Lab49 really is cutting edge and I’m sure that use of technologies such as Silverlight on high profile, innovative projects confirms our cutting edge status.

Give me a call or drop me an email to learn more. marie.downes@lab49.com +44 (0) 20 7248 9499.

Want to meet up with other cool .NET technologists? Want to share ideas and learn more about .NET and it’s features? If so, why not join the London .NET Meetup group? Vivake just set up the London .NET Meet up group and we had our first meeting last Tuesday. It went really well and Vivake even got to meet up with someone who we have subsequently offered a job to.

The great thing about it, for .NET bods, is that this is in NO WAY a corporate thing. We are simply providing the location, the food and drink. There are no recruiters, sales people, marketing people etc invited - it’s all about .NET. Visit: http://dotnet.meetup.com/121/ to find out more. Our next meeting in in late August.