Announcement: All over the world, the idea of a collaborative workspace is becoming more and more widespread. Why are coworking spaces are so attractive both for freelancers and startuppers?

A coworking space is an equipped workplace for a group of people to work together. These can be regular offices and conference rooms, as well as large public areas where people can work and communicate with each other. People pay according to the lease terms for their workplace, or space, depending on how they use it. In some cases, people can use the common area free of charge.

In the coworking space, you can often see web developers and other people involved in the IT industry. As well as people from other industries who decided to work outside the office – now the list of coworking residents has expanded significantly.

These include consulting companies, banking, and insurance institutions, the media. Many large firms move customer service departments, innovation departments, and project development staff to the coworking spaces. There are several explanations for the demand and growing popularity of coworking.

Cost and flexible lease terms

The first and main advantage of the coworking surface is its rental price. Prices for the regular offices are very different – it depends on the city, location, the building in which the premises are located, as well as the repair and furniture.

The money for which you can rent, for example, excellent coworking spaces in Dubai, you will not be able to take on lease good regular offices, not only in the center but also in remoted districts. In addition, when using a regular office, you should take into account the costs for cleaning, Internet, and renting additional spaces for utility rooms (wardrobe, bathroom, kitchen area, coffee zone). When calculated all the additional spendings on organizing a comfortable office, the average cost of one employee accommodating in a coworking space is several times lower, whilst the equipment is better.

The flexible rent terms of a workplace are also very attractive: it can be rented for an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year. With a long-term lease, the cost decreases, and one can secure his own place.

Higher productivity, lower distraction

Sometimes it’s not possible for an employee to work remotely from home, and the way to the company office requires a lot of time and money. The coworking spaces have workplaces equipped with computers and Internet, conference rooms, and lounge areas. And the atmosphere itself is conducive to productive work, it disciplines the employee, doesn’t distract him with household chores. The employee concentrates only on work, all household and other issues do not concern him.

Since everyone in the coworking space is busy with their own business, such an efficient activity stimulates you to work. It’s not appropriate to watch various videos or listen to music in the place people came to work hard. When you work in a separate office or at home, this allows you to do anything, including not working at all.

Active networking

It is a great opportunity for startuppers to find themselves among like-minded people and expand their network of acquaintances. You can find business partners, colleagues, and even investors among the coworking residents.

You can communicate with specialists in your field, exchange experience, improve your qualifications and get advice from more experienced professionals. For free. Such communication always takes place at a high ethical, professional level, but at the same time, it is not necessary to enter any kind of business relationship with colleagues and cooperate with them every day.

Professional environment with good design

Almost all centers have conference rooms, which are usually tastefully decorated and contain everything you need for presentations, negotiations, and similar meetings. This is another advantage of the coworking space. There you will always find TV, projector, internet, whiteboard or flipchart, tea, and coffee.

As a rule, many coworking spaces are designed in a modern and functional style that is pleasant to be in and even more so to work in. The nice design of the room and a variety of furniture will dispose and inspire you to new goals and ideas.

Necessary socialization

Most of the coworking space residents are freelancers. The downside of a freelance lifestyle is the lack of a team and communication, and such isolation can cause permanent stress in some workers’ lives. Coworking perfectly solves the issue of freelancers and remote workers socializing. While in a coworking space, it is simply impossible not to communicate with others working in this space. In addition, you can test your idea here and receive feedback or an unexpected solution.

Useful events

Within coworking space, where appropriate premises are provided, the following events can take place:

• Conferences and lectures are performed according to their structure – performances, communication, breaks, and coffee breaks.
• Business training and a variety of educational activities are held not only for those who are currently present in the hall but also for those who are hundreds of kilometers away, thanks to the World Wide Web.
• Service or product presentation, where many startuppers who have ideas, and a desire to implement and develop them, can meet their future partners.
• All kinds of masterclasses, where the lecturer can share the necessary and useful information with the audience.

Such a modern world phenomenon as coworking is suitable for freelancers and owners of small startups. If an informal atmosphere, expanding the network of acquaintances, and the opportunity to work at any convenient time are important to you, coworking is the best option.

If you’re feeling stagnant in your business, startup, app, blog, or whatever else you’re working on, time in the coworking space might be exactly what you need to get things going smoothly again.

Your approach to hiring will inevitably define your organisation. Bringing in the right talent will take your business from strength to strength, while weak or ineffective hires cost you money, waste your time and diminish your resources.

Care and attention at every stage of the hiring process are essential in making your company an attractive place to work for prospective employees. But, an imbalance in your hiring process could mean you attract ill-fitting candidates, leading you to hire the wrong people and affect your company culture. 

So how can you avoid the pitfalls of hiring? Video may be the answer.

Why Is an Effective Hiring Process So Important?

When more top performers are leaving established companies for greener pastures, a faultless hiring process is essential. Finding people who will fit into your organisation while bringing something new to the table is no mean feat, especially if you have experienced employees handing in their notice during a turbulent period for businesses.

An effective, well-established hiring process has several benefits:

• Achieve Faster Growth — Gaining a competitive advantage over your closest rivals will help you establish dominance in your sector. If you neglect the hiring process, you’ll likely run aground when it’s time to expand. This can put the brakes on your company’s growth, but efficient hiring allows you to surpass the competition with ease.
• Ensure Minimal Disruption — Keep capacity issues at bay by acquiring new talent as and when required. A refined hiring process will allow you to quickly fill gaps within your teams when employees leave or when a department is ready to expand. This ensures that everything keeps running as it should, even with personnel changes.
• Reduce the Costs of Hiring — By investing in your hiring process, you’re reducing the cost of hiring over time and within your business as a whole. Establishing an effective hiring process early on will make your company more alluring to potential future employees, reducing the cost of hiring when it’s time to expand and making the best use of the talent you already have.

Since the efficient acquisition of new talent is so beneficial, it’s crucial to optimise your hiring process. So how can you make the most of it?

Using Video as Part of the Hiring Process

Video can help you communicate complex or nuanced information more effectively than text-based communications. The written word is better suited to relaying specifics like salary information, whereas videos provide greater depth, allowing you to describe your company in detail. This gives your potential hires an accurate representation of what working at your organisation would be like, allowing you to tell your unique story confidently, creatively, and compellingly.

It’s been proven that video outperforms other communications in terms of engagement, making hiring processes that incorporate highly visual aspects a lot more enticing than those without such components. So how should you use video in your hiring process?

How to Use Video In the Hiring Process

Creating videos for hiring can spread your message far and wide without duplicating communications in interviews, allowing you to streamline the process of hiring and acquire new talent efficiently. Videos don’t need to be long; they just need to relay important information about your business and “sell” the employee experience.

Here’s how video can benefit the entire process:

1. Attract the Right Talent

Reaching skilled, like-minded individuals is key. Talented people with options will weigh up whether or not your position is worth applying for, so you need to go the extra mile to show potential hires that your company is the perfect fit. A short, branded video about your company’s mission, including examples of your previous work, will go a long way in attracting the kind of people you want on board.

2. Recruit the Right People

Once candidates have read your job description, watched your hiring video, researched your company and applied for the open position, you’ll be ready to interview them (if they seem like a good match). Video interviews are commonplace now, but you should ensure they go off without a hitch. They’re still a great way to find out more about your candidates without the need for travel.

3. Make Onboarding Excellent

Now that you’ve done the hard work and secured an amazing hire, make sure they feel welcome at your company. Videos can be useful in this process, so why not create a short introduction video to your various departments and teams — introducing a few friendly faces along the way — to help new employees get settled in their roles. This will also help recent hires feel more comfortable about approaching their new colleagues.

Improving Internal Communications with Video

There’s no reason to stop there if you’ve used video as part of your hiring process.

Asynchronous communications shouldn’t be limited to text-based messaging and voice memos, as videos can significantly enhance employee engagement. The right kind of video content can help new people get to grips with their role quickly, build relationships with their colleagues and enjoy a welcoming atmosphere when they start working for your organisation.

As you scale your business, you will need to start scaling and automating your marketing efforts. Most people with growing businesses will look to migrate from their current ESP to a more powerful automation platform for better features. Marketo is one such platform. Migrating your entire marketing effort to Marketo might seem daunting, but it becomes easy if you have a checklist to guide you through the process. 

Outline your needs

Before you start preparing your migration checklist, you must prepare a list of expectations and goals that you hope to achieve from this move. Your reasons for moving to Marketo should be infallible, and you cannot list FOMO as one of the reasons. In addition to that, you will have to do a cost-to-benefit analysis to ensure that this move is financially feasible. Moreover, you can unload or remove outdated data from your storage to reduce the burden of data transfer during the migration process. 

Pre-migration checklist

• Backup 

Backing up your entire database might seem like a mammoth task, but it has multiple benefits. Migrating your marketing information and email strategies to a new platform is not a bulletproof process. There’s a chance that you might lose some valuable information during the migration. Therefore, it is better to back up all your email lists, marketing information, and other operational information. 

You can use Excel or Google sheets to compile your data in an easy-to-locate file. The spreadsheets should also contain links for your landing pages and images. Hence, even if you lose anything during the migration process, you should be able to locate it quickly.

• Clean-up

Marketo charges can vary based on the number of people in your database. Hence, having duplicate and inactive accounts will cost you significantly more. So, once you have taken your backup, you need to start cleaning your lists. You have to de-duplicate your CRM leads to reduce your migration expenses. 

Engage your entire marketing department and begin the clean-up process. At first, it might seem inessential, but it is going to make your transitions a lot smoother. You can use this time to reorganize, recategorize, and redefine your marketing strategies. This way, you will be able to locate, implement, and compare different strategies post-migration quickly. 

• Restrategize

Before migrating to Marketo, you will have to mark out the current campaigns and separate them from your older campaigns. Once the migration process begins, you will get some free hours to rethink your marketing strategies. You can brainstorm with your marketing department to find creative solutions to your marketing roadblocks. While planning for your future campaign, you can incorporate Marketo templates and other special features in your strategy.

Advantages and challenges of migrating to Marketo

The Advantages

• Price

The pricing structure is flexible and offers multiple packages. You can select the plans that suit your marketing style. During the migration process, Marketo will charge you per customer in your database. Therefore, you can drastically reduce your migration charges by removing inactive and duplicate accounts.

• Highly customizable

The Marketo marketing platform offers modular features. Consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, marketing automation, and management. Additionally, Marketo provides tailor-made solutions to your marketing woes. You will also have multiple Marketo templates at your disposal to design your emails. The dashboard is customizable as you can hide the stats which you feel are unnecessary.

• Analytics

You can track your ongoing campaign with ease. Marketo dashboard provides you the feature of pulling metrics of your current as well as your past campaigns. With such data, you will get better insights to make changes to your marketing strategies.

The Challenges

• Complex pricing model

Small businesses that are looking for simple solutions for their marketing problems might find the pricing model of Marketo a bit outrageous. Usually, marketing automation companies offer a single service with a variable pricing model. But Marketo offers four services, and each of those services has several different packages. The sheer number of combinations is enough to overwhelm a marketer.

Furthermore, Marketo is comparatively expensive. If you have planned to migrate to Marketo, ensure that the move is generating favorable ROI.

• Complex setup

Marketo indeed offers bespoke solutions to businesses. However, these solutions tend to be highly technical. If the marketer does not come from an IT or analytics background, they might have a tough time understanding and implementing these solutions. During the Marketo migration phase, you might need to hire a Marketo expert to help set you up.

Conclusion

Migrating to Marketo is infinitely easier for the Salesforce users as they are based on the same platform. If you are planning your migration from a different ESP, you only have to follow the above-mentioned pre-migration checklist to ensure a smooth transition.