Startup Weekend is a world-wide movement where wannabe entrepreneurs get together over a weekend and work like the dickens to launch a startup based on an unfunded untested cockamamie ideas and then present them to potential investors. Sometimes it works but most of the time people learn that their ideas aren’t all that good in the first place, and then Monday morning they go back to a day-job they don’t like very much.*
Staffup Weekend is like that, except that participants spend a weekend working on projects of their own choosing in the presence of employers with proven businesses and funds to hire.
Staffup Weekend aspires to be a world-wide movement bigger than Startup Weekend because, after all, more people need to go to work at jobs than become independent entrepreneurs.
The idea with a Staffup Weekend event is that the employer does not judge candidates on their resume before seeing them in action. Nobody is turned away from a Staffup Weekend event (although some drop out because they can’t cut it).
The people who come to the event decide what they want to do and then break into teams and do it. The job of the organizers and employers is to roll up their sleeves and help. Only after working side-by-side do employers decide who they want to invite for an interview.
Even if you don’t get the job, you’ll meet people and learn new things. And whatever the candidates create belongs to them, so who knows, you might go off and start your own business anyway. (Note: This doesn’t appeal to the kind of people who don’t like learning and making things, but those people seldom appeal to employers, so it all works out.)
An investigative journalist attended one of our events undercover and she wrote an honest account of the experience in Our Hiring Process is Broken. Can a Hackathon Fix It?
The Wall Street Journal wrote about another client in Helping the People Who Don’t Get Hired.
If you are an enlightened employer who knows that the only reliable evidence that someone can work is that you see them working, then please contact me and let’s talk.
If you are unemployed with great organizational and some sales experience and you’d like to put on a Staffup Weekend event, then please contact me and let’s talk.
If you are a recruiter looking for a great way of bringing candidates and employers together wholesale instead of one-at-a-time, then please contact me and let’s talk.
I’m Brooke Allen, and I’m at (707) 276-6530 and Brooke@BrookeAllen.com
* I hope I didn’t give he wrong impression. Startup Weekends are great and it is worth going just for the experience. Hell, Staffup Weekend was born at a Startup Weekend.
But if you go to enough Startup Weekends, as I have, you start to suspect most people are there because they don’t like their jobs and they have bought into the idea the you’ve got to be the “Startup of You” when the fact is they just need a better job and they shouldn’t have to worry about raising money, finding customers, making payroll, dealing with competition, and making rich people richer just in order to have another job.
So, Staffup Weekend is like Startup Weekend without all the business planning, marketing, and venture capital BS. Just make something you’re proud of. If nobody wants to hire you then you can always make a business out of it later. Whatever you come up with belongs to you.
Staffup weekend is not about ripping off your ideas. It is about giving you a place and the time to shine.
Brooke Allen 