First Talented Advisory Board Meeting
What Advisory Board?
A wise man (myself) once said: “One of our main goals at Talented is to help developers and designers find and land their dream jobs. In order to do that we have to listen closely to them who we’d like to help. Therefore, they should be invited to participate in our strategic work”.
In June 2018 Talented formed an Advisory Board that consists of the Talented community members. The main purpose of the board is to help us listen more closely to the needs and aspirations of the community. You can read more about the Advisory Board from our announcement.
Meet Samuli, Petri, Jemina, Antti, Juho, Kim and Jordan!
Agenda of the meeting
The first ever advisory board meeting was held on Tuesday 21.8.2018 at Talented Helsinki office. Once everybody had arrived, we had a round-table of introductions since it was the first time all board members were present. After the introductions, Teemu and Tuomas from Talented gave a presentation on how Talented got started two years ago and how it has evolved since then. The duo also discussed the core values and the organization structure of Talented as well as Talented community numbers. If you’re interested in the numbers, there are ~1200 developers and designers in the community and nearly 150 companies.
Majority of the meeting was spent on workshopping on two topics: “The Talent experience in onboarding” and “How to improve the Talented community”. The advisory board split into two teams, and spend a reasonable amount of time discussing these two topics. Once the teams were ready, they presented their thoughts to all participants.
The Talent experience in onboarding
Transparency, communication and taking Talents’ preferences into consideration were seen positively by the board. Talented’s help with salary negotiations got praises too, but the board also mentioned that the salary levels and ranges should be discussed more. Another area of improvement is keeping Talents in the loop after they have found new boots to stand in. This is very important because we are here to find the best possible jobs for them so regular check-ups if the new job still matches their expectations and hopes is essential. If the role doesn’t feel like the best anymore after some time, we want Talents to remember that we’re still here for them and ready to help find new challenges.
How to improve the Talented community
We like to bring the fans of different technologies together and organize different types of events: We have learned about Go, discussed investing and how to build satellites, and even visited inside the crown-jewel of Finnair, the Airbus 350XWV, just to name a few of our events. Diversity is wealth, so we’ll do our best to organize events with diverse topics and also focus more on the educational edge, which is what the board wished for.
The board also named two very important matters: Integrating new Talents to the Talented community and a concern over the man- and developer-driven community, where designers and women might find it hard to belong and participate in the community. The existing members of the community have done a great job at waving back to newcomers and keeping the discussions flowing at #general and #random on Slack, but we’ll surely take actions on creating a mechanism for the integration.
After the teams had shared their thoughts, our CEO Harri went through the financials of Talented. We want to be as transparent as possible to our Advisory Board so that the members can advise us the best possible way. After Harri’s presentation, we went for a dinner at Ravintola Nokka and spent the rest of the night getting to know each other better. The next advisory board meeting will be held in November or December 2018.
Huge thank to all the members of the Advisory Board for helping us improve our service and community!