Meet & Greet 2020
A message from Trent Mankelow, Summer of Tech CEO
An apology, an explanation and an epilogue in regards to Brazen and our online Meet & Greet 2020 experience
Like everyone else, we were surprised when Lockdown 2.0 was announced on the 11th of August. We made the call to move our Meet & Greet events online, which meant we needed to quickly find a provider that could host an event of our scale. Brazen seemed like the best by far and within a week we'd signed a contract for them to host Meet & Greet and speed interviews.We hosted two test events to get comfortable with their platform— our mock interview sessions which had over 100 people per event—and didn't encounter any show stoppers. (Like everyone, we are susceptible to cognitive biases, and in hindsight, there were a bunch of bugs that we were explaining away thanks to some confirmation bias, a little optimism bias, and a sprinkling of sunk cost fallacy.)The Meet & Greet on the 8th didn't go well. Brazen was slow and buggy, the video calls were flakey as, support was AWOL. But we felt like we had no choice but to go with Brazen again on the 9th, given the timeframes. We were hoping that their support team (which they had forgotten to roster on the 8th ) and the advice to employers to go off-platform for video calls would help improve the experience. It didn't. Things were worse.We are very sorry, about both events. We are sorry for the stress we put you through, sorry that many of you didn’t get to speak with the employers you were hoping to, and sorry that the experience was nowhere near as good as the normal, in-person event. As you can imagine, we were pretty upset/furious/disappointed-Dad-face-emoji with Brazen. We very keenly felt your pain and disappointment - almost everyone of you had a bad experience. Brazen’s response made it worse - an apology email that said they didn't release Personally Identifiable Information when they clearly did, an incident report which only covered one of the bugs, a make-good offer of a free event . So yesterday we had our Big Meeting with Senior Brazen Representatives armed with 10-pages of talking points, including many heart-felt quotes from you (thank you to the hundreds of you who filled in the post-event surveys). On that call, we finally got some answers about what went wrong. It turns out that on the weekend before our event, they shipped one of their biggest production releases ever, which introduced an "exorbitant amount of bugs...a tsunami of events" that were only noticeable under load. Guess who was hosting the very first event after that release? Ta-da! Ultimately, it was great to get such a clear admission of guilt. They told us what we wanted to hear - "we clearly did not meet your expectations...we're very sorry...we're personally embarrassed." In light of what happened, we've made a bunch of tweaks e.g. we've increased the number of jobs you can apply for from 10 to 15, we've emailed employers with the students who had queued at each booth.For those taking in part in next week's speed interviews, best of luck. At least you’ll be using video calling technology that will work better than Brazen’s did.If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch via info@summeroftech.co.nz!