Meet the </salties>: Erik Granlund Novo

Meet? Erik Granlund Novo , Sales & Partnership at?School of Applied Technology < /salt>.

Every week we interview a Saltie and with Erik, we talked about his career at SALT and also about his search for the best ramen restaurant in Stockholm.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your work before joining SALT.

I come from Portugal, born and raised in a small village north of Lisbon. I grew up there with my family and all of our amazing dogs, and I can say that we’ve had all kinds of dogs, everything from a Grand Danois, Saint Bernard to a Dalmatian. Then I moved to a town in Sweden called S?ter in 2007. As a kid, I loved to do all types of sports from football to archery.

My first real job was at the famous big blue box, IKEA. My first job there was selling hotdogs and then I continued to work in all kinds of departments over a span of 3 years. I can say with ease that I have assembled more than 10 000 hotdogs. Then, I moved to ?rebro where I started my university studies and took a degree in Human Resources. During my last year in 2021, I started scrolling through LinkedIn as I wanted to find a job in Stockholm and stumbled upon this exciting ad to work as a recruiter for a tech start-up. The rest is history as they say!

You switched departments at SALT, from People & talent to Sales. What similarities are there?

Yes, I did! So excited to continue to grow internally at SALT in a new awesome role. Even though I’ve changed guilds, we’re following the same goal of giving many people a chance to start their dream job as a developer. As a recruiter, sometimes you needed to convince the concept of SALT to candidates, which now is an everyday activity as a salesperson. Still, instead, it’s CTOs or other types of managers that I need to convince.

How does a typical day look for you? What do you do on a regular day?

Now that I’m new to this role, I want to try to get as many activities going as possible. In the morning I set up a to-do list and also some goals for how many people I want to contact and how many intro meetings I want to try to get booked. I’ve started to browse through relevant tech news sites in the morning, to find out which companies to pay extra attention to. Then it’s just a matter of either going through the call list I’ve set up, responding to emails, or reaching out to relevant people on LinkedIn. When it’s time to stretch my legs, I’m always down to a game of ping pong!

How is it to work in the tech industry?

It’s no secret that tech can be a challenging field to work in, it’s a fast-paced environment where unexpected events can occur. That is one of the reasons I enjoy it! Once you’re in it, you will be able to thrive not only in your work life but in your personal life too. I get to work close to inspiring and great people from whom I learn new things daily.

What random hobbies do you have?

To say that I love watching movies and TV shows doesn’t sound like a random hobby. But when I pause the movie and tell about what happened during a specific scene or about an actor’s current career, is when my hobby of “unnecessary movie facts” awakes. I have recently found an interest in testing different ramen restaurants in Stockholm. Please let me know if you have any tips on where I should go next!

Thank you Erik for a nice chat!