Inside the Landing.jobs Festival 2016 — and the team behind the Lisbon tech career event
Phew. What a ride.
The Landing.jobs Festival 2016, that is.
After four months of hard work, it’s amazing to see how much this team accomplished to make it all come together.
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In a time when professionals have themselves become owners of their own career, a career event made sense in our minds. We stood by what we’ve always wanted to offer you: a career event to launch your European tech career.
We had companies from all over Europe, from Germany to Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. We hosted 60 of them and were so glad to see more than a 1.000 people flocking to this year’s Festival, including 80 of the best tech candidates from Europe and Latin America.
“I enjoyed my 2 days at the event and I need to thank Landing.jobs for the effort they made to bring good talent from Europe and Latin America. It is a good sign to see that the tech movement is finally waking up in Southern Europe. Keep it up!”
— Javier, Challenge Winner from Spain
On the first day, companies started arriving in the morning while some of us had our little goodie bag assembly line set up, which included writing a little message on around 1200 notebooks. Talk about a human touch.
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Our check-in time was set up for 4pm, but we opened up a bit earlier after seeing so many people lining up to get in. You might have bumped into our own Rita and/or Bo, who so fantastically broke the ice and welcomed candidates and employers at the entrance.
A warm Ri(ta)ception
We kicked off the Festival with the Opening Session, with Landing.jobs co-founders, Pedro and Paiva; Teresa Fernandes from Portugal Ventures; and Paulo Soeiro de Carvalho, General Director for Economy and Innovation at Lisbon City Hall.
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While we’re 5 months away from the first-ever Web Summit in the Portuguese capital, it was wonderful to hear Paulo Soeiro de Carvalho talk about the Landing.jobs Festival as “one of the postcards of the Lisbon tech hub” — and we’re working hard to one day be seen as the tech event in Lisbon and a hallmark in Europe’s tech scene.
Throughout both days, we had a packed schedule — neatly shown on our Official Event App, Eventfuel.io.
Some of our Panel Discussions included Speakers from Zalando, Uniplaces, and Web Summit. Below is one of them, “What does it take to become a great CTO?”, with Miguel Pinto, CEO at Lookatitude; Peter Tilsen, CTO at Uniplaces; Thomas Döhler, VP Engineering at Typeform; Nuno Barreto, CTO at WideVentures; Luis Peralta, Tech Lead at Schibsted.
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“After its second year, the Landing.jobs Festival has cemented its position as the annual must-do event for people interested in the Lisbon tech scene. Great people, great atmosphere, great event.”
— Marcus Almgren, Techlead @ Signicat, Speaker
We also had Talks by many of our Speakers along our four rooms. Below is Ricardo Vice Santos, sharing his story in this Talk, “Punk hardcore for entrepreneurs”.
“Punk hardcore for entrepreneurs”, by Ricardo Vice Santos, co-founder @ Roger
And the boats! The boats. Unfortunately one of them broke down on the first morning, so we had to rearrange the schedule and the duration of each journey. Even so, they gave a real chance to tightly mingle with candidates and employers.
It was wonderful to see so many smiling faces and phones held high for a good selfie — and the flood (pun not intended) of #LandingjobsFest all over our social media channels.
Moments like these ones make us feel like we’re doing something right. One of the best things about the Festival, especially for our Ops team, is the chance to meet face to face with the candidates and employers they talk to on a daily basis.
“At the Festival, you actually have the ability to be a marketplace manager. You have the companies, you know what they’re looking for, and you know the candidates. We connect the best of both worlds and help the candidates in a different way because we can get to know them better.”
— Fátima, Portugal Team Talent Developer from the Ops team
Hotel? Trivagoooo!
Selfie on the Blip boat
At the end of the day, it was great to see both candidates and employers from attending companies having fun. Just check out our friends at Typeform right in the front row during the performance of Ritmundo!
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Between the first and second day of the Festival, we also hosted a hackathon with Redlight Software and jeKnowledge. A big chunk of the participants made it ’til the end, including the winners — the inventors of the Shotspresso. #Champs
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And finally, we also hosted a drone race with the help of Portugal Drone Race, sponsored by our friends at Hitachi Consulting.
We’ve already sent over surveys to everyone, and the positive feedback has just astounded us. Panalpina, for example, was a last-minute Sponsor who heard about the Festival and immediately wanted to jump on a plane and come to Lisbon — and so they did.
“Landing.jobs is an outstanding team that really cares about the onboarding experience of a company no matter if we have to run against the clock, while preparing all the pre-requisites to accommodate our needs. Through their 2-day Festival which was very well organised, we could find top quality candidates which were already pre-selected for us while bringing awareness to our company.”
— Panalpina, Gold Sponsor from Switzerland
At the end of it all, we’re left with one thing to say: thank you. Thank you to you, the wonderful Candidates; thank you to our amazing Sponsors; thank you to our Ambassadors and Volunteers who took so much weight off our shoulders; thank you to our Partners; and thank you to our friends and family who also helped.
A very special thank you to the whole Landing.jobs team — it was probably one of the hardest things we will have ever done and we’re very proud of it. From the Product Man Tiago; to Candidate Experience extraordinaire Pedro Castro; to the merchandise wizard Andreia; to the Speaker charmer Palha; to the tireless Tarouca who took the lead right at the beginning and didn’t fail to make this a great event — this team was unstoppable.
“During an internal meeting, our co-founder José Paiva challenged the team to throw ourselves to the wolves. I didn’t think twice; I wanted to take the lead of this year’s Festival! The hardest thing was to organise an event with this dimension with a team that didn’t have the knowledge and experience to do so, but you know what? Having the resources we had, we did an amazing job! #ThanksTeam”
— Mario Tarouca, Landing.jobs Festival Project Manager
“We planned these two days for months. We worked endless hours to make sure that everything was in place. We had boats breaking, electricity failing, buildings collapsing, video cams without memory and somehow we managed to pull it off. We ran, we fixed, we built, we solved every single challenge that was thrown at us. All this while most of the people there just kept quietly enjoying Europe’s most amazing jobs Festival on a boat. I’m just happy I survived to see the next day.”
— Tiago, Head of Product
And survive we did.
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In the following weeks, we’ll show you some more of what happen on June 3 and 4, including some of the panel discussions, talks, and a sure-to-be-amazing wrap up video. Stay tuned and see you next year!
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