Category: From The Floor

The best team collaboration tools

COVID-19 has altered our working habits in a number of different ways, but none more than introducing us unceremoniously to remote working.

However, working from home was growing in popularity far before it became the enforced norm thanks to lock-down, but if you’re new to the concept or just need a bit of help, we’ve come up without top 5 favourite tools to help streamline your productivity when working from home.

Zoom – Video Conferencing

Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars. The basic version is completely free of charge and is available on your desktop and mobile device.

Check out Zoom here >

Teams – Collaboration and Chat

Microsoft is your hub for teamwork in Office 365. All your conversations, files, meetings, and apps live together in a single shared workspace, and you can take it with you on your favourite mobile device.

Check out Teams here >

Trello -Project Management

Trello is a web-based Kanban-style list-making application which keeps all your projects on task at work, at home, or anywhere in between. Free users can add one Power-Up per board and up to 10 team boards.

Check out Trello here >

Dropbox – Cloud Storage

Dropbox lets anyone upload and transfer files to the cloud, and share them with anyone. It’s great for moving large amounts of data between team membersanytime, anywhere. A basic account comes with 2GB of storage space and is always free.

Check out Dropbox here >

‍Headspace – Meditation & Wellbeing

Mental wellbeing is as important as physical wellbeing and in these testing times we’ve turned to Headspace to help. With hundreds of guided meditations to help with stress, anxiety, focus, relationships and more, the programmes are delivered direct to your phone every day. Headspace offers a 2 week free subscription or is currently free for unemployed for a year during the COVID crisis.

Check out Headspace here >

5 more of the best team tools

Canva

Canva is a graphic design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. Users can choose from many professional designed templates, and edit the designs and upload their own photos through a drag and drop interface.

Check out Canva here >

Blink

Replace your desktop intranet with our award-winning employee app and watch adaption skyrocket. It enables greater engagement and gives your team access to everything they need. Blink gives every member in a highly personalized feed with a curated flow of posts. When employees open Blink they see photos, video, comments, links, gifs and more, all organised by category. The app also gives you ne place for your team to find the crucial company files they need.

Check out Blink here >

Netflix Teleparty

Teleparty (formerly Netflix Party) is a new way to watch TV with your friends online. Teleparty synchronizes video playback and adds group chat to Netflix, Disney, Hulu and HBO.

Join over 10 million people and use Teleparty to link up with friends and host long distance movie nights and TV watch parties today!

Check out Teleparty here >

Slack

Break free from conversations over email – Slack is a new way to communicate with your team. It’s faster, better organized, and more secure than email.

Check out Slack here >

Calendly

In short, Calendly helps you schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails. You can connect up to 6 of your personal calendars and set your availability for people to book in with you. You’ll never get double booked again!

Check out Calendly here >

This article is a continuation of Part I: Why Space Sector Recruiting is More Than Recruiting. If you haven’t yet read Part I, we suggest that you do so now. At EVONA, we embrace a holistic model of recruitment.  When considering the space sector as a whole, we see the function of recruitment as similar to the function of the circulatory system within an organism: it enables and manages the flow of vital resources through the system.

We view recruitment as a vital organ of the space sector itself, existing in a symbiotic relationship with the entire industry. Just as the circulatory system delivers life-giving blood to all the different organs of the body, a recruitment system delivers the “life-blood” of innovation and productive economic activity—talented people—to all the different sub-sectors of the space industry.

Therefore, a healthy, functioning space sector requires a recruitment infrastructure that is designed to support the needs of the sector as a whole, in addition to the needs of individual job-seekers and hiring companies.

The Roles and Responsibilities of Space Sector Recruiters

This holistic conception of recruiting fundamentally changes how one views the roles and responsibilities of space sector recruiters.

The more conventional approach focuses on recruitment as a relationship between individual job candidates and individual hiring companies. In this model, recruiting  is a service that benefits three parties—candidates, hiring companies, and the recruiting agency itself.

This conventional model may be acceptable for recruiting professional athletes, but it is not acceptable within today’s space sector, where there is a great deal more at stake.

The holistic conception of recruiting includes all of these conventional elements, but adds to it consideration of the impacts of recruitment activities on the vitality and direction of the space sector as a whole—and on the array of stakeholders who may be impacted by activities originating within the sector.

The reasons for this broader perspective are clear. Think of military recruiting in a time of war. Or recruiting into public health service at a time of global pandemic. In these contexts, it would be perverse to imagine the role of the recruiter solely in terms of earning a paycheck for signing up recruits and matching candidates to open positions, without considering the broader context that motivates the need for recruitment in the first place.

With space sector development we can’t identify a singular goal that animates the whole enterprise, like winning a war or stopping the spread of a disease. We’re talking about open-ended, market-driven commercial activities, where we want and expect a thousand flowers to bloom.

But we understand that this garden of commerce will be an incubator of new ideas and technologies, some of which are destined to have far-reaching impacts. Developments within the space sector will create an array of possible futures that would not have existed otherwise. Whether we have human colonies on Mars within thirty years will depend on what happens within the space sector today.

Space Sector Recruiting is More Than Recruiting

With this bigger picture and longer view in mind, you can see why at Evona we believe that space sector recruiting is more than recruiting.

It’s recruiting with a mission: to attract and prepare the most capable people for meaningful and fulfilling careers in the space sector; to help them find opportunities with companies that are best suited to their goals and talents; and to provide a network of human resource services that support the productive work of the space sector.

Fulfilling this mission will take us beyond the conventional match-making role of recruiters. For example, to attract and prepare the most capable people for work in the space sector, we can’t wait for them to show up at our door. We must seed the pool of candidates by providing opportunities to attract, educate and inspire talent at all ages and stages of life, from young students to late-career professionals.

Thus, one of our aims as a space sector recruitment agency is to create awareness and inspiration throughout the education system and among the public. Students of all levels need to be aware of current and future initiatives within the space sector, and what skills and training are most useful and in demand. And they need to be exposed to the great variety of forms that a career in space can take, to know that it’s not all rockets and astronauts.

In this role we are functioning more as ambassadors than recruiters for the space sector. But this is exactly what we mean when we say that space sector recruiting is more than recruiting.

Putting it all together

Talented and motivated workers are essential to any business venture. To be successful in the space industry, a company must attract the most prepared and capable candidates. Good recruiters help to identify and prepare candidates for success within the right fields and the right companies. These services save companies time, effort and resources that they can then allocate to innovation and productive work.

The end result is not just well-placed candidates; it’s well-equipped companies that are better able to make a productive contribution to the space sector—and, by extension, a positive impact on the human experience.

At Evona we see our role as space sector recruiters within this broader frame. We understand that we have a role to play in shaping the story that humanity is writing for itself.

It is not our role to dictate how that story should be written. But we care deeply about how it unfolds, and we view it as our responsibility to have an eye on the bigger picture and the longer view, as we serve the recruiting needs of our clients.

 

July 20, 2019, marked the 50th anniversary of the first humans landing on the Moon. On that date in 1969, over 500 million viewers worldwide were glued to their television screens as the crew of Apollo 11 made history.

Sadly, in the decades following the Moon landing, public and government support for space exploration dwindled. But these days, governments are no longer the sole funders and developers of ambitious space initiatives. In recent years a commercial space industry has blossomed, making the sector far more accessible to private enterprise and enabling the proliferation of entrepreneurial space companies around the planet.

At EVONA our sole focus is space sector recruiting in this new and rapidly advancing era of commercial space development.

But our mission isn’t simply to match great candidates with great job opportunities.

It can’t be. Because development within the space sector has the potential to radically alter the course of humanity as we navigate through the 21st century and beyond.

In this industry, we’re not just creating jobs. We’re creating our future.

Not All Recruiting is Equal

No matter the industry, the basic goals of recruiting are the same. A recruiter is fundamentally a match-maker; someone who helps organizations with open positions find candidates who fit the part. The goal is to make the match in a way that saves time, money, and effort for employers and is a positive experience for candidates.

Good recruiters are good match-makers. It takes experience, knowledge, skill and hard work to be consistently successful at identifying talented candidates and pairing them with the right opportunities, in the right fields, with the right employers.

This is one obvious way in which not all recruiting is equal. Not all recruiters are equal in experience, knowledge, skill, and dedication. Some recruiters, and recruiting companies are just better than others at the fundamental aspects of the job.

But recruiting can differ in another important respect.

Not all industries have an equal impact on human welfare. Not all sectors have an equal role to play in determining the opportunities and outcomes for current and future generations. Not all markets are equal in the degree to which they can offer solutions to pressing social and environmental concerns.

Consider the differences between:

1. recruiting for a professional sports team;
2. recruiting for a legal or finance firm;
3. recruiting for the military in a time of war; and
4. recruiting for the health industry in a time of global pandemic.

Even if every recruiter is an equally skilled and effective match-maker, there can be enormous differences in the significance and potential impact of one’s recruiting activities, depending on the industry and the context.

If we had to rank the relative importance of these recruiting activities, we’ll rightly pick (3) and (4) over (1) and (2).

The Space Sector Will Shape Our Future

Here’s the question: Is recruiting for the space sector in the 21st century more like sourcing white-collar employees for a law firm, or triage nurses for a stricken CDC outpost?

It may be easy for some to discount the very real implications of the work currently being done at space companies around the globe. Some may see the space industry as devoid of tangible value for the average citizen—or perhaps, as just a bunch of high-minded science-types high-fiving each other. However, at EVONA we believe that the technological developments that are taking place now have the potential to fundamentally reshape how we live and interact, and will influence what future possibilities are open to us as a species.

It is for this reason that we view space sector recruiting as more meaningful, more impactful, and more important than many other commonplace industries.

We all love our sports teams and our lawyers. But developments within the space sector and its associated technologies will have a deep and lasting influence on human society and our ability to cope with rapid social and environmental changes. This is an important difference.

We Are EVONA

Today, we are witnessing the beginning of a new and exciting era of space sector development. As dedicated space recruiters, we are determined to guide the emerging entrepreneurial space workforce to their ultimate destination: companies and positions wherein individuals can make the most impactful contributions for the betterment of humankind.

At EVONA, we aim for excellence in our fundamental role as space sector match-makers. But we also aim for excellence in the space sector itself, to help it grow, thrive, and ultimately realize its potential as a shaper of positive futures for humanity.

Our discussion on space sector recruiting continues in