Somewhere Blog

We’ve just released an exciting new version of Somewhere. Yay!

We kept hearing from our wonderful community that they wanted to be able to connect with other people in Somewhere. So now you can follow people (and also companies) and see the latest things they’re working on in your activity feed.

You can get started by following the lovely Somewhere team; Justin, Duncan, Conor, Matilda, Nina, Carla and Luc. You can also follow our Welcome profile which gives you some more tips on using Somewhere.

The best way to discover other people (for now) is to explore company sparks, see who’s commented on things, and click through to their profile and follow them.

We’ve also made a big update to personal profiles (ok, we did call them Postcards at one stage but that wasn’t quite working).

People are already making some pretty awesome profiles on Somewhere. Check out Julian, Lena, Simon and Calliope for starters.

Now that you’ll be more discoverable on Somewhere, it makes sense to update your profile and continue to share your aspirations, inspirations, professional interests and current work on an ongoing basis.

We’d love your feedback. So head on over to Somewhere, log into your account and have a play around.

You can add some posts to your profile as we’d love to know;

What are you working on?

Since launching the new Somewhere site late last year we’ve had heaps of feedback asking for different features. One major comment has been that while the rich company profiles on Somewhere are a great showcase for companies and their Sparks, there hasn’t been anywhere for individuals to communicate who they are. 

So, to bridge this gap we’ve just released a new beta feature called Postcards - personal profiles!!

Your profile is the place for everyone to showcase who they are. Here you can express yourself on a work level, sharing your aspirations, achievements, and what makes you tick. It’s not simply another online portfolio or CV - there are already so many of these we don’t need (or want) to replicate them. Instead we want your Somewhere profile to be a beautiful and unique representation of who you are and what you’re looking for.

This could be a photo of your latest personal project, places you like, things you adore, work that inspires you. You can also share links to your online presence, like GitHub, or Twitter. 

We’d also like your profile to be a way for companies to learn more about you, so we’re making Postcards visible to companies. And any time you like or comment on a company’s Spark, your Postcard will be even more visible to them.

Currently this is a beta feature. We’ve kept things basic for now in order to learn more about what we need to add. And we’d love your feedback!

To create your own sign-in and click on “Update Your Profile”. For inspiration take a look at Somewhere designer Conor’s Postcard, or our co-founder Duncan’s.

We can’t wait to see your profiles and hear your thoughts!

For decades the multi-billion dollar global recruitment industry has been geared towards one thing; getting people jobs. The problem is that people - especially the younger, well educated, and more mobile ones - are not necessarily looking for a “job”. 

It seems an insensitive comment given the global economic and youth unemployment malaise. But even current economic conditions don’t disguise the fact that people’s work aspirations have radically and fundamentally changed.

People are looking for something more than just a job. And we see and hear evidence of this almost every day from our wonderful community.

Take Inga here in Berlin.

“Work should be a reflection of who you are.”

People’s needs have drastically changed and yet the fundamental tools of recruitment have barely changed in decades. Judging by some pretty epic past job descriptions (IBM in the 1950s), and this one below from 1860, they might have even gone backwards!

Via http://instagram.com/p/UKKb-xqrUp/

Likewise, companies’ needs have radically changed. They’re desperately looking beyond mere skills and experience to find people who actually fit their culture (we’ll discuss this more in another post).

With such a radically changed problem space, it’s no wonder traditional solutions are failing so badly and why work surveys consistently show that well over half (even 71%) of people are dissatisfied and disengaged.

So how do you move from solving a problem of helping people find a job to helping them find somewhere they fit?

TIME FOR A DIFFERENT APPROACH

The most scathing criticism we hear about the recruitment industry is how impersonal it is. Which is ironic given it’s the one industry that truly should be about people.

It’s one reason why we love meeting our community in person (whether that’s in Berlin over breakfast, over glühwein, a party and some drinks or a pop up exhibition, or in London, Copenhagen or Sofia). It’s also why we encourage every person who joins our community to start a conversation with us.

We also constantly hear about people’s frustrations with outdated artefacts like CVs and generic job descriptions. Which us why we facilitate richer, more personal interactions and conversations on Somewhere.

For companies, we don’t create yet another ‘employer branded’ profile, instead we help them showcase the personal, human and authentic elements of who they are (e.g. MOO, Fjord Design, Readmill and Nerd Communications). We’ll also soon be helping individuals on this front as well.

And then there’s the recruitment ‘transaction’ (a.k.a the job offer). Don’t get us wrong; ultimately we want to help people find and secure their perfect work. But this takes time. And rushing things through at the last minute often leads to terrible outcomes.

Of course we understand companies will continue to have urgent needs to hire, which is why we are helping them build thriving talent networks filled with interesting and suitable people. So when the urgent need arises, their headaches, costs and efforts don’t suddenly explode.

WHERE TO FROM HERE?

It’s still early days for Somewhere and we’re humbled constantly about how complex these problems are.

We know this is just the beginning. Our current phase of simply redesigning recruitment tools for humans (not human resources) is in many ways the easy bit. 

In the future we imagine an entirely different scenario and possibilities.

Where finding work that matters is not an impossible mission or unattainable luxury. Where there are no soul destroying ‘job searches’ strung out over months or years. No more weeks and weeks of knocking on doors desperately trying to get your foot inside one. No hair-tearing frustration trying to find out what places are really like, showing who you truly are, and trying to work out whether there’s potential for fit.

Instead, you as an individual will be completely empowered to find the people you should be working with.

And that’s a problem worth solving.

Onwards, there’s work to do.

- Justin
(@juzmcmuz)
and the whole Somewhere team.

Come take a peek at our own team on Somewhere.

We finished 2012 with some new features, some new companies and plenty of new people - thank you all so much for making 2012 a big step forward for all of us, and all of you, at Somewhere.

Now that the dust has settled a little bit, here’s a little overview of what Somewhere is, in 2013…

A place for you

Now everyone on Somewhere has a place to call their own. When you signup you’ll see a homepage full of “sparks” from our companies:

Collections

As you look around Somewhere, you’ll likely find companies and sparks that you’re interested in, and we help you save those into a collection too:

Shapes

And, of course, talking to companies is still the core part of Somewhere. When you follow a spark and discover a company that you want to talk to, you can see the types of people they want to talk to before starting a conversation with them:

Getting Started

But if all this is a little new, then you can have a conversation with us at Somewhere to help you get a feel for how everything works:

Exciting!

Yes, we’re very excited about Somewhere, even after a lovely holiday break :) Head over to http://www.somewhereHQ.com and check it out, and let us know what you think in our new forum too…

[This post is being re-published with permission from our friends at Third Wave. Thanks guys!]

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Third in a series of interviews with people whose work we admire: designer Conor Delahunty. Conor tells us what pop songs have to do with service design, how the state of the recruitment industry is like Gotham City, and gives us a peek at what he’s working on at Somewhere.

Conor (@conordelahunty) is a designer working at Somewhere. Recently arrived in Berlin, he previously worked for Made by Many in London. He likes the internet a lot.

What are you working on?

Right now I work for a new company called Somewhere. Somewhere is looking at the (pretty massive) problem that is how people find work that matters to them. We like to say we’re designing a service for humans, not human resources. That means we focus on people and the way that they talk to each other, not technology. But if we are to tackle this problem properly, that also means we have to build brand new tools and infrastructure! Catch-22, but I think we’re figuring out the balance. We were running a beta for a while and have just rolled out our first product. Baby steps right now but hopefully the next release will be a much bigger one.

How do you see the current state of affairs in the employment market?

I think it’s like in Batman Begins, you know! Ra’s al Ghul thinks Gotham is beyond saving, and that it must be allowed to die. I feel the same way about the recruitment industry. It’s a massively inefficient, deeply impersonal, cripplingly expensive, broken system. We know that people’s relationship to their work, their ambitions, their mobility, etc. is changing drastically. It needs a fresh start, a whole new way of thinking about the problem and what people really want out of it. I’m inclined to think we should just ignore the industry rather than save or change it! To quote Clay Shirky (I know, I know!), “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”.

What do you want to change about that through your work?

Studs Terkel has said about work, “It’s about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash.” If we can design a thoughtful, humane service that helps people with that search I’ll be very happy. We want people to find the people that they should be working with.

What other topics have become interesting to you lately, and why?

Pop Songs

I do lots of service ecology mapping and user journeys and all these other dry-sounding exercises to try and make sense of what we should be doing. When I’m making them though, I keep thinking about pop songs. I think a great service is like a great pop song. Introduce a catchy idea, keep it bubbling along, hit people with an irresistible chorus every now and again, keep it brief enough that it leaves people wanting more, etc. etc. So I’ve decided to just write pop songs instead making flow diagrams! It’s way more fun.

Gaps

How do you design and build little gaps and broken spaces into things that encourage people to do something unexpected with the product/service you have created? Twitter and MySpace were full of these little gaps and that why I think they did well. When people are moulding the experience to their needs you get a much stronger sense of ownership. I like the fact that you don’t even really have a choice now either. IFTTT allows you to pull services apart and only use the bits that interest you.

3D Printing

I’m not really interested in the printing side of things right now but more so the impact it could have on our mindset. If people get used to being an integral part of the entire lifecycle of a product (i.e. creation, distribution, consumption, etc.), what does that do to a generation? What will they then want from products and service or even institutions? How will people approach boring things like banking or mobile phone contracts when they think or even know that they should be allowed to have a huge impact on how the system works, or that they should be allowed to just take the small bit that they see as valuable?

Architecture of home icons

I’d love to do an architectural review of home icons from popular sites and apps. I want to know what types of houses these companies are building for people and what that might say about what these companies think of their users.

Diversions 1994-1996 by Lee Gamble

I’m getting a bit lost inside this record. It makes me nostalgic for a time I was neither a part of nor had any real interest in! He took a load of samples off of his old Jungle mixtapes and made these hazy ambient memories out of them. Reminds me of “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.”

Mariachi Connecticut Serenades a Beluga Whale

It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen on the internet [watch here]. I can’t stop watching it. Bizarre, tender and beautiful.

What does your media diet currently consist of?

It’s pretty standard I guess. Twitter is the backbone; I’m always on it and it’s where I discover 80-90% of everything these days. My favourite account right now is @SeinfeldToday. For example: “Jerry breaks up with a beautiful woman because she favorites every one of his tweets. Kramer and Newman start a podcast.” Perfect. I also love Tumblr and I listen to tons of podcasts.

Oh yeah, I use Reading.am all the time. It’s just a big list of what people are reading right now. I always find a few gems in there every day. I urge you all to sign up. It’s really lovely. I don’t really buy too many magazines anymore, usually only when I’m flying. Stuart Eccles (@stueccles) once told me that he thinks the 20 minutes after take-off and before landing when you’re not allowed to use an electronic device will be the last dying breath of the magazine industry!

[Here’s the original post. Thanks again to Maddie at Third Wave.]

One of our aims at Somewhere is to present a unique insight into how and why the companies on our platform are such special places.

Traditionally companies like to do this with over-arching mission statements, corporate-style communication and polished employer branding. Research with our users, however, suggests that most view this approach with a large amount of cynicism.

So we prefer to focus on presenting the human, sensory, and psychological dimensions of a company: showing how people feel at their workplace, how they interact and communicate, express their individuality, the ideas that inspire them, the challenges that engage them, and the ways they all work with each other. 

In other words, all the things that give a genuine, authentic sense of a company’s culture.

To do this we use small vignettes - we call them Sparks - that demonstrate the rich cultural fabric of each company.

Comprising of photos, video clips, GIFs, and sound clips, Sparks are designed to capture an informal, intimate, and emotionally evocative snapshot of the people, places, objects, thoughts, beliefs, and practices that form part of a company’s story. If you’ve visited our website in the past couple of months you will have seen our homepage, and company profile pages, festooned with them.

We want Sparks to act like small windows into the soul of a company, to offer a glimpse of the many parts that comprise a company’s whole. More importantly we want Sparks to ignite some kind of feeling -  a point of recognition or an emotional response - something that will motivate someone who connects with a Spark to dive in, learn more, and start a conversation with that company.

We’ve recently made our Sparks share-able, and we’ll occasionally be posting our favourite Sparks in our social feed. But with almost 300 Sparks already published, and many more waiting in the wings, we’d love you to share your favourites too! Just open the comments section of a Spark. It will reveal a permalink button for the individual Spark page whose URL you can share.

Meanwhile, enjoy some of our current favourites below. Can you guess which company they’re from?

A new version of Somewhere is being built right now, and there are plenty of temptations we need to avoid along the way. The largest of these is what I’ve been calling the “technical solution to a social problem”.

A technical solution to a social problem is a short cut. When it’s easier to solve a fundamentally social problem with a few lines of code. In recruitment, a technical solution to a social problem is apparent when it’s easier to build something online than it is to take to the time to meet people, invest in a conversation with them, or understand the various concerns and expectations. And it’s easy to see the temptation - using technology to solve things suggest they are solvable, whereas a conversation can quickly change direction and might not easily resolve itself. Why even try to deal with those social complexities when you can use technology to create a production line through which all your interactions with people take place?

Technical solutions to social problems, in recruitment especially, highlight just how broken things are. Understanding how recruiters use technology to avoid contacting you or dealing with you as a real person made us want to create an alternative, for the real people on both sides of the conversation.

We believe that the people in a company and the people they want to meet are fundamentally the same. We’re all humans and we’re all better off when the technology gets out of the way. We connect over small, personal details, and when it works it’s instinctive and subjective.

Using technology to save yourself the difficult human interactions with the people who are you customers, clients, benefactors and supporters is anathema to us. Any time we start down a path of solving the social problems at Somewhere with technology, we stop and find an alternative. It’s hard. We’re used to making things, and it’s easy to solve problems by making more things, but the key to what we’re doing is in the intangibles. If we can’t easily define where you fit, then the answer can’t simply be encapsulated within a few lines of code.

I believe that technology leads you to create rules and logic, and where you fit is subjective.

In recruitment, one of the worst examples of a technical “solution” is the one-click-to-apply button. A small piece of technology which makes it easier to apply for a job but  simultaneously raises the volume of spam for a company, whilst lowering the quality of those applications. Elsewhere, “social recruiting” is another technical solution to a social problem. The temptation of social networks means that recruiters now believe they can mine your online presence and imply some professional traits - but really they’ll trawl your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages with robots before they take the time to really understand who you are and what you want.

Technical solutions and choices like this reveal something far more interesting about recruiters though - that they would rather wade through “big data” collected by spidering the web for your name and profile, that they would rather overload a company with masses on irrelevant job applications, and, sadly, that they would rather rely on technology before they would engage you in a conversation. The truth is that recruiters don’t like you. They don’t like talking to you and they don’t want to get to know you.

Technology has now become a commodity. We talk about “making it scale” when we really mean sending out auto-generated emails, we talk about developing a platform when we mean getting someone or something else to do the work, and we talk about customer support when we mean installing chat-bots instead of hiring and trusting a living, breathing person. But it’s not a scalable solution when your technical choices create more work for the people involved. It’s dumb technology which blindly scrapes content and palms it off to a company to make sense of it all.

Our anti-technology approach means that the biggest problems we face are the social ones of explaining who we are, why we’re different and why we ask so much of the companies and people we work with. That’s why the human touch is so central to our approach.

These are the principles that we’ll stick to in the making process, even if it slows us down. We talk through and test our choices extensively. And it’s reassuring to read about people making similar choices, in particular the idea of Scaling Down.

The opportunity we’re chasing is about taking recruitment beyond where it is now, and for many reasons there are plenty of signs of a shift away from social, to the real and the personal.

Right now the biggest challenge for all of us is to scale back on technology and remember how to communicate with people honestly. We’re doing that, and we won’t use technology to answer on our behalf for any of those questions.