Sapient Nitro - In-class group discussion

On Friday in Career Option class, a few employees from Toronto's Sapient Nitro came to visit and we had a nice group discussion and informal presentation. Sonia, Eiko, and David are all employees at Sapient. Sonia is the Director of Human Resources, Eiko is the Associate Creative Director for U/X focus, and David is the Senior Art Director at Sapient Nitro.

During this discussion and presentation, they started out giving us a brief and descriptive about Sapient and Sapient Nitro (the creative side of Sapient). Sapient is a company that has 6000 employees globally. They are a company that focuses from creative design, technology, project management to user experience. Sapient is a company that has end-to-end capabilities. This means that they can build things on their own without having to outsource any of their designs to other technology companies. They design, create and delivers all. Sapient is company that has a great diversity of positions. This is a company that gives you opportunity to learn and grow. It is also a company that allows you to travel a lot and you can even have a career manager who will assist your career path at Sapient.

In the Toronto office, SapientNitro is located downtown, Richmond and Spadina. They have around 200 employees and is currently adding more. The office mainly focuses on digital work. Their goal is to be like a full production agency, just like the New York Sapient.

One very important that they also mentioned to us what is User Experience and how they achieve it,
User experience is basically designing solutions for the user. It is important to when doing design research that we go and talk to people about online experience, build up personnas of your target, and do whatever it takes to learn about them as much as possible.

During this discussion, they've also explained to us a few things they will particularly look for when it comes to hiring an employee:

• If you can basically get up and talk to others easily, you're already a chosen candidate.
• A great team player
• Come prepared for your interview - laptop or portfolio set up before the interview
• Knowing a bit about the organization of Sapient
• Being to explain the process work in your portfolio
• Showing your process work to explain your work
• Being open as you can about the position's work, being flexible with the duties of the position.

Another very interesting thing that I found during this discussion was the video they showed us about their most recent and current design work. It was very well done and it certainly intrigued me to find out more about them and even consider to apply there once I grad!