Hear from Hatch Alumni about their experience and what they're up to now.
Team update: A lot has happened since this blog - all great things! We’re now in the United States and our new product launched in November 2021, helping teams in fast-growing organizations find and hire their best-fit junior and mid-level talent in Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Customer Success. Try it here for free. This means some of our articles before this date may have product shots that look a little different. That’s all from us, enjoy the blog.
Hatch helped me figure out what I didn’t want to do with my career. This wasn’t the learning I expected, but it helped me realise how much I missed working in startups and allowed me to develop conviction regarding my career choices.
One of the highlights from my placement was I was working in the same building as my girlfriend! We could go to and from work together and even grab lunch, which made the experience very memorable.
Now, I’m working in business development at Pave, an early-stage startup based out of San Francisco, tackling the broken ecosystem of compensation. I absolutely love the fast-paced energy of working at a high-growth startup.
Given the lack of structure, and room for growth at early-stage startups, I’m blessed with responsibilities that allow me to both help the company’s trajectory and have fun while we’re at it!
Lisa Vu
Hatch role: Communications Projects Coordinator at Westpac
Like many students reaching the end of their degree, I was feeling a mixture of anxiety and excitement from a self-imposed timeline to find a full-time job as soon as I finished studying. My Hatch role opened me to the world of communications and gave me experience working at a large corporate company, teaching me valuable skills in navigating numerous stakeholders and running simultaneous comms campaigns.
As this was my first comms-specific role, I was surprised at how well my skill sets worked in the field. I was able to take up projects quickly, and I had a great team who gifted me their time to mentor and upskill me. And because I had such a great experience, it definitely influenced me to look beyond purely marketing roles (which was what I thought would be my career trajectory) to now expand to communications - which is now my current role.
I currently work as a Communications Executive at Microsoft. I love many things about my role, from the team culture to the flexibility and autonomy. But if I reflect on the role itself, it’s definitely the wide array of projects I get to work on each day. I’m encouraged to instil my creative license, such as when I work with graphic designers to pull together a brand campaign identity, to working with organisations to build a customer case study.
Every day is different in the comms world. You have to be prepared for what comes into your inbox that morning. And I think that medley of projects keeps me engaged as I’m continuously learning.
I was very fortunate to have been involved with Hatch early in my career, and the experience had a formative impact on where I want to go in the future. Initially, I had a very traditional view of my career (and by that I mean - graduate with your Commerce degree and head to the Big Four). But then I realised there were so many interesting ways you could achieve success in life. For example, in my placement with Dimmi, I realised that you could have a voice in challenging so many meaningful business issues in a startup environment, even as an intern. This realisation helped me broaden my perspective and reevaluate what I really wanted to achieve in 5-10 years, ultimately motivating me to push myself to land in the role I am in today.
The highlight from my time at Dimmi that has stuck with me through the years has been the opportunity to challenge the status quo.
When I first joined Dimmi, my responsibilities had a material impact on the business, but were simple, repetitive and easy to bundle. I quickly felt that, despite the comfort in which the business operated these practices, there had to be a better way to do things. I made it my mission to leave the business with a lasting impact and set off to experiment with new methods to complete my work by automating key, manual tasks throughout the day.
While I was initially hesitant to do this, the excitement with which my team and manager supported my efforts helped me validate the importance of being a problem solver, as opposed to a silent problem spotter. The excel tool I was able to create at the end of my placement represents the fruits of these lessons and is something that I continue to be proud of today.
I’m currently a management consultant at the firm Oliver Wyman, and what I love most about my role is the opportunity to shape a young, rapidly growing office with some of the smartest people in the world.
Among its major competitors, including McKinsey, BCG and Bain, Oliver Wyman is a relatively new player that is just growing its roots in Australia. While this means that we often don’t have access to the same resources as the behemoths, we each have a larger voice in the business. We're provided with a platform to shape the office culture and adopt bigger responsibilities. What makes this incredible is the concentration of talent in our small office, and I love knowing that every individual I get to work with is extremely motivated, capable and takes pride in their work.
My Hatch role solidified my intuition for wanting to go deeper into technical roles, and showed me an example of how companies from various sectors adapt the latest tech to their specific needs and use cases.
Working at Westpac through Hatch gave me an insight into how big large organisations can be. Walking across tall skyscrapers to attend meetings with thousands of others from all corners of the group was definitely an experience! After finishing my Hatch placement, I joined Baraja, an Australian startup that makes LiDAR sensors for autonomous vehicles, as a Software Engineer in the Perception team. I’ve since moved onto my current role a Q-CTRL, another cool Australian startup, this time focusing on quantum computing and sensing.
I love having a big impact in all the projects I’m part of, and helping shape the culture of the team and the company I work at for the better. I’m passionate about deep tech R&D and the intersection between research and industry.
My roles with Hatch allowed me to gain career-relevant work experience that helped me decide the type of work environment I wanted to be part of, and gave me an insight into alternative pathways to graduate programs for when I finished my degree.
I was part of the ideation and execution of the very first Afterpay Day campaign back in 2017. That sales event is now an annual and global occurrence! It’s pretty cool to realise I played my small part in birthing that idea.
