The Mother of All F**k Ups 💥

Hi there! I am Ramalho, José Ramalho 🍸 It’s been a few months since I’ve started this crazy journey at Damia Portugal and exploring the Tech Recruitment world.

Integrating a new team, especially as someone who has come out of the university with very limited previous experience in the field, there’s this innate perception that you need to prove yourself. Sure, I went through a recruitment process where they validated if I was the perfect fit for the company culture and position but there’s always this voice putting an extra amount of pressure on ourselves.

Having been in this situation a couple of times, I’ve decided to take upon myself to share my perspective on the matter hoping this could be useful to someone who may be trying to quiet down that inner voice in their head and enable their ability to keep growing and learning inside an organization. 🚀

· Communication

Especially when joining a team in a remote setting, establishing good communication practices has been a key aspect on my day-to-day activities. Working 80km away from the nearest team member and more than 300km from our headquarters, there have been few occasions where I was able to be face to face with my co-workers.

Besides the Zoom calls, the main source of contact is by writing in chats and that may present some challenges. In a lot of instances, the manner something’s said is everything! When you’re talking through a keyboard, the usual support of your body language and intonation is gone, therefore, you’re at risk of sounding rude or be misinterpreted. However, by making this an open subject that we feel comfortable discussing in the team, I’ve been able to truly engage in conversations freely. 👇

· Trial and error

This one in particular, I had quite a hard time adjusting to. When you’re trying to prove yourself as a someone of value to the team, I guess the first instinct is that you can’t make any mistakes and you need to be perfect. Therefore, saying that you must try and eventually mess up a bit to grow as a professional, may sound a bit contradictory.

Once I arrived at Damia, I had no previous experience in tech recruitment (I’ve had some background in HR at a tech company and that was it) but soon enough, after having some training, I had to start conducting my own job interviews with no support and become more independent in my day-to-day activities. I remember spending an unnecessary amount of time making sure I had everything planned and knew exactly what to say but, in the end, the interview almost always had a detour, and I was forced to rearrange my speech on the spot or the candidate would talk about a subject I was not very familiar, etc.

Sometimes mistakes were made and I had to solve them but at the end of day, those were experiences that allowed me to get out of my comfort zone, learn and continuously become a better recruiter.

· Asking for help

I guess this is something everyone feels once they get out of university. We spend years studying to try and be qualified to whatever profession we may choose afterwards but the reality is that the job market is very different than the dynamics of the academic world.

When imposing on yourself the pressure to perform at a certain level, sometimes there’s a need to showcase that you know enough or that you can handle any situation with no additional support. Besides, when you do ask questions, especially when you work in a setting where examining someone’s body language is nearly impossible, you don’t want to appear too needy or be annoying and mess with your co-worker’s workflow. Sometimes we get inside our heads and that prevents us from reaching out. Consequently, a task that could’ve been solved swiftly, ends up being dragged in time.

I’ve battled with this for a time in the past, but I was fortunate enough to have colleagues constantly calling on me whenever I hinted in a conversation that I was being annoying or disturbing because I interrupted to ask a question. Fortunately, that ended up infiltrating my brain.

In conclusion

There’s no real formula to get through these blocks. It’s important to try and do things by yourself and make mistakes in order to grow, however, at the same time, I truly realized that if I don’t ask question, if I don’t ask for help, it can be equally as damaging. To everything, there’s a balance!

Starting a new challenge can be, you know, challenging.

But as someone that gets inside his head A LOT, something that I always try to remember is that I don’t really know what anyone else is thinking and that assumptions, as someone once told me, are the mother of all f**k ups! 🤯

About Ramalho:

José Ramalho aka just Ramalho is Damia’s youngest tech recruiter (he was nicknamed by his surname right from the start as we already had another Jose in the team).

Although he’s in the beginning of his recruitment career, Ramalho has proved himself to be a tech enthusiast, full of energy with a big willingness to learn! He even took it upon himself to be one of our time referees in order to make sure that all our zoom meetings are efficient and not plagued by fatigue.

He joined Damia during the pandemic, and in full remote fashion, he has been working from his hometown Viseu! This has been a random but fun contribution to our Zoom meetings, as we are able to hear the birds chirping next to his window and often the wonderful green landscape around his house🌳

Check out his LinkedIn and say Hi to Ramalho.

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About Damia Portugal:

We are an international innovative IT recruitment company with over 25 years of experience working across all levels, from support right up to executive board level, with our HQ based on the UK.

We came to Portugal with the promise to shake up the market and redefine how one engages with clients. Our core goal is to develop relationships across the market, offer a disruptive (but positive!) approach with both clients and candidates, always based on open and transparent communication.

We take the stresses out of recruitment and engage the right professionals who will excel in your organization.

We use out-of-the-box sourcing techniques.

We are innovative, disruptive, transparent and relaxed.

We came to the market to do it different and we love it!