Business

New on Passport: Station F in Paris launches jobs board; skills versus degrees debate

(Editor’s note: We created Passport, a place where we – and you – can post anything from your search for an apartment to your startup’s pitch to investors. Think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs … where to find not just housing and careers, but fulfillment, friends, and fun across Europe.)

A few weeks ago, we noted we could pull together a new careers post just based on tech jobs in Eindhoven. And we could. But when we started working on that, we noticed this is increasingly the case across Europe.

Take Station F in Paris, Europe’s largest co-working space/startup accelerator, which claims to have 1,000 startups.

And we believe them. Station F is the brainchild of billionaire French entrepreneur Xavier Niel, who funded the transformation of an old train station into Europe’s largest startup center.

Station F has transformed Paris – best known for a conventional center of finance and fashion – into a potential player in the course of a few short years. We say “potential” because no Skype, Booking.com or TransferWise has come out of Paris. Yet. But as we always say, it’s better to be at the beginning of something great than at the end.

Besides, Tony Fadell – the guy who Steve Jobs brought in to help Apple create the iPod and iPhone – has set up his own investment firm, Future Shape, at Station F. (There’s a terrific post on Surface about Fadell.)

The Station F jobs board is essentially a bulletin board, but a 21st-century version and very well done.

A lot of the “jobs” are actually internships, but there a fair amount of full-time positions and freelance opportunities. And, as with every innovation center in Europe, they need developers in Paris. EVERY flavor of developer …

Here’s a quick sample:

Shipup is looking for the tech talent to take them to the next step and acquire bigger clients. That would include a senior developer.

This would be a key position, assigned to integrate new e-commerce platforms and new carriers to make Shipup accessible to all e-traders, everywhere in the world, especially the United States.

Shipup is sort of the French version of Shyp … except, unlike Shyp, Shipup is still in business. So this could be good career timing.

Shipup is SaaS that tracks parcels for e-commerce clients in real time to create a branded and delivery experience with proactive notifications, personalized tracking pages and a satisfaction survey on delivery. Their tag line is “Shipup turns shipping into marketing.”

You can apply here.

Bruno is a new fintech company/digital personal finance coach based at Station F that has incorporated AI. They need – you guessed it – developers.

Here’s the description of what a front-end developer would do from the website:

• Work on Bruno UI (Messenger / web) and on our visuals to make Bruno the simplest and easiest retail banking service around.

• Implement pixel perfect UI using HTML and CSS 

• Closely work with the product manager to release new product developments at a fast pace 

• Coordinate with our growth manager to produce marketing visuals 

• Make sure our product implementation is scalable 

Bruno’s schizzle-dizzle is helping people save, and they’ve raised 1 million euros. But it looks like they have plans to move into all banking services.

You can apply here.

Sensego is looking for an account manager and customer success executive. The company uses AI to predict customer desires, then purchases for banks, insurers and travel companies based on cell phone activity.

The basic requirement for the job is the ability to “build and manage a relationship of trust with our clients, CMOs and CDOs of major companies of Travel, Media and Bank,” according to the jobs board advert.

You can apply here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSlTnxC1MFg

Recast.AI, which has been getting a lot of pub recently, needs a bunch of developers including a full-stack developer. These engineers work closely with both designers to implement the user interface of Recast’s platform with modern tools and with data scientists to industrialize the Machine-Learning NLP workers.

You can apply here.

There are soooo many listings and so many new companies in retail, e-commerce, real estate and everything else that we blew a couple of hours just browsing.

The one thing we haven’t figured out is how we would live in Paris on a startup salary.

N26 raises $160 million … so get ready for a serious expansion

Berlin-based fintech startup/virtual bank N26 just raised $160 million in a Series round co-led by Allianz X, the digital investment unit of Allianz Group, and Tencent Holdings Ltd., China’s dominant internet giant (think WeChat). This makes a total of $215 million raised since N26 started in2015, according to a NASDAQ news release.

This latest injection of capital represents the largest later stage equity financing round in Germany’s fintech industry and one of the largest in Europe. We’re guessing this is going to mean a LOT of new jobs at N26.

We checked, and there already are 46 cool jobs at N26’s Berlin-Mitte offices including:

Communications Manager (English.) They’re looking for someone who’s a native speaker of British English, and who has skills in another language as well. (German, French, Italian and/or Spanish.) But you help launch N26’s entry into the United Kingdom. How bad could that be on your resume?

You can apply here.

Head of Content. This is another English language job, though N26 would also prefer you speak and write in one of the other core business languages including German.

Here’s an abbreviated list of the duties:

  • Own the global marketing content strategy and calendar for N26, creating best practice toolkits and guidelines for a combination of global and localized execution
  • Define, evangelize, and drive adherence to a clear communication standard/ tone of voice across all channels and customer touch points
  • Strategize, project manage, and execute outstanding content supported by video production, graphic design and great copywriting
  • Social media and content marketing: lead these teams to create compelling visual and copy-focused content to drive organic growth and position N26 as a leading financial resource

You can apply here.

We sampled the non-tech jobs, but N26 also has openings for just about every sort of computer engineering, developer/IT job you can think of.

This is a fairly mature startup. Since its launch in January 2015, N26 has acquired more than 850,000 customers, with a goal of reaching 5 million by the end of 2020. N26 has processed more than 9 billion euros in transaction volume to date, with a projected volume of more than 13 billion Euros in 2018 alone, according to their website.

ASML HIRING 3,000 PEOPLE

In case you missed our most recent Eindhoven Business Briefing, ASML, a foundational company of the digital age, is hiring.

Like crazy.

This Philips semiconductor-industry spinoff, which has an 85 share in the photolithography industry, is hiring 3,000 people at the rate of about 250 new employees per month, according to ASML employees. Many of these new hires are highly skilled migrants, so ASML is likely the biggest employer of Eindhoven’s burgeoning expat community.

ASML is a multinational company with offices in 60 cities in 16 countries. The company has somewhere north of 20,000 employees, with a top-line 2017 revenue of 9 billion euros.

And speaking of ASML, they have a new software graduate program and several other ways to attract young talent.

Here are the details via the ASML website:

Do you know how to program? Have you recently graduated or will you graduate in the upcoming months? Do you want to know and learn what working as a software engineer in a professional company is like?

We have an offer you can’t refuse:

Get a great job at ASML and a fast start from our Software Graduate Program, a 6.5 week training to prepare you for this first professional job in your career

ASML will invest in your hard skills and soft skills. Skills that will prove to be valuable for the rest of your life

You will work within a highly complex environment alongside some of the world’s smartest engineers

The training will contain a combination of classroom lectures and hands-on work in some of our projects

The projects will enable you to experiment with the lessons learned in a safe environment

You will be part of a class of 12 graduates from all over the world. 

You can apply here.

Practical skills vs. degree debate

Speaking of jobs, Fast Company has an interesting post examining how important tangible skills are going to be in the new economy.

In “Why Practical Skills Will Matter More Than Your Degree In The New Economy,” a lot of C-suite types at big companies are on the record saying you don’t need no stinkin’ degrees to work for them.

From the post:

“Getting a job at today’s IBM does not always require a college degree,” the company’s CEO, Ginni Rometty, has asserted. “What matters most is relevant skills.” Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, has been pushing the same message at his company. And David Blake, cofounder of the learning platform Degreed, has put it like this: “It shouldn’t matter how you picked up your skills, just that you did.”

Billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel has been saying for awhile that colleges are overpriced relics of the pre-digital age. Theil not only argues college is a waste of time: He’s paying people to drop out and join his Thiel Fellowships.

BUT, the Fast Company post also points out that some companies that state they hire on merit screen out applicants who lack bachelor’s degrees. So, maybe it’s not quite time to skip university in favor of those YouTube coding classes.

Website | + posts
To Top

Subscribe to our newsletter

Receive the latest news and updates from Dispatches Europe. Get lifestyle & culture, startup & tech, jobs and travel news dispatched to your inbox each week. Keep up with what's going on in Europe. Everything Expat.

You have Successfully Subscribed!