Start-up companies are always ready to hire talent, but they never post jobs. If you want a job, you must tell the company why they need you. That was the take-home message when the Copenhagen Science City secretariat joined some 6,100 life science students at their annual career fair. By Jes Andersen.

Natural recruiting ground for public and private business

The SUND career Fair is hosted by University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences every autumn for their students and graduates.
As the Faculty trains doctors, dentists, pharmacists and a range of other health and care-related personnel, the fair is a natural recruiting ground for hospitals but also for companies within pharma and medical technology.

Experiment to present start-up companies

Traditionally only the largest of these companies have had representation at the fair. As an experiment, Copenhagen Science City chose to participate in order to promote the many job opportunities presented by more than 350 innovative start-up companies in the immediate area.

Entrepreneurship skills without business ideas

During a lively day at the fair, more than 30 students contacted the team to hear about the companies, and about how to get in touch with them. Conversations with the students revealed, that many were interested in the career-boosting skills they could get from working with entrepreneurship, but did not have a business idea of their own.

Two tools for job-seeking students and graduates

In order to help students looking for the elusive start-up jobs, Copenhagen Science City has created two tools.

• A web-portal to the seven start-up communities in the innovation district. Here students and graduates can browse through over 350 innovative companies to find the ones where they would like to work. Click here to read more…
• An easy-to-follow guide on how to apply for jobs with companies that have not posted jobs. The guide describes when companies are likely to be in the hiring mood and how to approach them. Click here to read or download…

And the one place where innovative start-ups DO post jobs

To every rule, there is an exception. The rule that start-ups do not post jobs has many. For example the start-up community Symbion, which is a Copenhagen Science City-partner, has recently created a job-portal for the companies in their community. Jobs posted at this site automatically feature on the University of Copenhagen job-bank “UCPH Projects and Jobs”.