Becoming more approachable

Yesterday we went to a career fair at ISCTE’s Business School. Our stand ended up right in front of the main access ramp. However, students never came to our stand directly. My current judgment on the reason people didn’t come straight to our stand is twofold.

First, as they descended the ramp they could see other stands on the sides and below the ramp, so they could have put those other stands on their wish list.

Second, if they came straight at us, it might unconsciously seem as hostile or too direct an engagement.

The students’ typical behavior was to come down the ramp, turn to the left or right and then slow down while looking around. We were not on their scopes when they surveyed their options. They usually came by us only after they had walked around the premises.

It was the first time I was on the company side of a career fair, so I tried several approaches to get students to have the initiative to ask for information, instead of seeming that I was having an intrusive behavior.

Just standing, waiting for people to approach just didn’t cut it. I imagined myself on the other side, and I had the impression that I like prying on them, desperate for their attention.

I was by myself from 11h to 18h and as I had brought a laptop, I used it to work a bit, though always paying attention to my peripheral vision. Whenever I saw that someone was slowing down in front of the stand I’d look up from the screen. They would shift their gaze at me and make eye contact. It hit me, I had to signal back that I was open to engage in a conversation.

Smiling and raising my eyebrows did the trick. Their body language after that became such that they were comfortable to approach me. I would get up, and they would almost instantly move forward to greet me.

I would then explain what Quidgest was all about and answered their questions, paying much attention to the feedback they gave back with their facial expressions and body language. Some wanted more information, others wanted less. Those behaviors are slight, and I let my thin-slicing judgment take over, as I have been reading about it in “Blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking“. I’m still not at home with this kind of work, though some more rounds I believe will definitely help me feel at home.

By the way, on March 6th and 7th, Andreia Jesus (Quidgest’s Marketing Manager) and I will be off to CeBIT, to meet with several people. If you are interested in getting in touch with us in Hanover, drop me a line at so we can get in touch.

– Pedro Palhoto, Marketing and Business Developer

Engaging in the social media space

Welcome to Quidgest’s Blog.

Quidgest is an information systems provider characterized by fast prototyping and evolutionary custom built solutions adapted to client’s needs. Instead of regularly providing pre-built systems, which are costly to adapt, we focus on having the ability to quickly build functional systems from the ground up. This is achieved through the use of our automatic code generation platform, Genio.

On the technical and business sides, we’ll gradually be putting out more content on the blog. In the mean time, you can check out our website at Quidgest.com.

For the purpose of the blog’s first post, I’ll let you in on how we will initially explore the social media space. Our first step has been to create this blog for Quidgest employees to be able to share in a corporate context, their progress, discoveries and opinions with like-minded individuals around the globe.

My role in this endeavor will be to help the organization throughout this first stage, getting to know how to move in the space. In my spare time I’ve been following the new/social media space enthusiastically through podcasts and blogs for the past two years which will help jump start this initiative.

Applying corporate blogging to our expanding small business will definitely require us to manage it through the gray, as C.C. Chapman would put it. Being a relatively unfamiliar medium in which people in the organization will start to explore in a corporate context, we’ll just have to figure it out as we go along. For instance, I’ve currently disabled comments, but kept trackbacks, for reasons put forth by a recent conversation on the topic at Twist Image’s Six Pixels of Separation.

Feel free to join the conversation by trackbacks or just write us an email to .

Take care and enjoy,

– Pedro Palhoto, Marketing and Business Developer