Cubicle to co-working space: London startups want to poach City workers
More than 30 of London’s tech startups are looking to hire City workers away from their corporate cubicles to the world of beanbags and co-working spaces.
Startup hiring conference Uncubed is hosting its first event in London, playing matchmaker between talent in traditional corporate jobs and creative technology companies, and urging people to ditch their cubicles for a more exciting startup.
Uncubed co-founder Tarek Pertew said it was the perfect time to launch its first event in London as demand for a digital workforce grows in the capital. The sector is expected to create 6,000 new jobs and add £12bn to the economy over the next decade according to research by Oxford Economics.
250 jobs are expected to be on offer at the inaugural event with more than 30 London-based digital technology companies looking to recruit from across the corporate sectors, including social network Badoo, money transfer service Transferwise, “Netflix for kids” Hopster and ad platform AppNexus.
Transferwise CEO and co-founder Taavet Hinrikus said the booming London tech scene needed to attract the best talent in order to maintain growth.
“We are currently home to some of the world’s most innovative and creative technology businesses, and more startups are attracting funding in the capital. Startups offer new challenges to those that are working for larger more corporate companies and we’re happy to see a successful conference like Uncubed launch in London to help address this issue.”
Uncubed has already has hosted 23 events in five US cities and Berlin, attracting 13,000 attendees with startups offering 6,500 jobs, including Facebook, Spotify, Tumblr, Twitter, Buzzfeed and Mozilla.
The event will also host free classes on startup leadership, such as “Predict the future by inventing it: the role of the startup product manager” and “Scaling a frontend codebase”.
Uncubed will take place at the Banking Hall on 26 September in partnership with Silicon Drinkabout event organisers 3beards, developer community Skills Matter and Android software developer Novoda.