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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.