Last Tuesday, Increo was excited to be able to take part in the ROCKSTAR Startup Fair hosted by DLA Piper and Social Walla. A fun experience, to be sure, and useful to boot, but we took away some very intriguing insights.

Our “booth” was a desk in a small room; there were perhaps a dozen other companies with other desks, all ringing the perimeter of the room.

Lesson #1

Covering your table makes you look good.

When you have no idea what kind of situation you’ll be in, this is a variable you can control. Distracting wood grain? Cheap plastic? No place to stow your stuff? A cheap table cover takes care of all of those problems. The Official Increo Tablecloth isn’t even expensive; it’s just a couple yards of inexpensive suit fabric.

Lesson #2

When you’re a really small startup, a low recruiting budget doesn’t necessarily mean low-budget recruiting.

Are we crazy, dedicating a computer monitor and a machine to drive it to something as insignificant as displaying our logo? What about a poster on the wall?

As it turns out, people don’t notice posters on the wall any more, and this isn’t so much a waste of dedicated equipment as it is “Hey, I’m going to be out all afternoon recruiting, why not just bring my office setup with me?” That display and the machine running it are nothing more than the machine I use all day long.

Lesson #3

That table? It’s a barrier, not a crutch.

Every table in the room was furnished with two chairs behind it. Following the obvious suggestion, most of the companies had their two people sit in the chairs behind the table, just like anybody would.

Don’t fall in to this trap! You’re much more interesting, engaging, and attractive if you stand in front of the table! Sure, it provides a way to keep candidates at arm’s length, but why the heck is that a good thing? With candidates, it’s easier to listen, easier to connect, and certainly easier to communicate on a level when you’re standing in front of the table.

Use the table as a place to dump stuff and display eye candy, not as an implicit intermediary.

Lesson #4

As always, passion is the key.

In college, all of us learned that a recruiter sees a hundred people in a day and won’t remember anybody unless that person is distinctive, so you have to make yourself distinctive. This cuts both ways: at a startup fair, nobody is going to have heard of the companies there, but they’re potentially going to work for you if you can sell yourself.

The candidates at the fair were certainly aware of this: the energy level we got was outstanding and it was pretty clear that the people there were, indeed, rock stars. People did interesting things like send us Backboards with their résumés after the event.

Of course, the old maxims apply equally to both sides: half the companies there had a short stack of single-sheet job descriptions, a page with their name on it, and two people sitting behind the table.

Increo’s table was centered around our product: two machines running demos of Backboard, ready to interact, and a big screen with our brand in the center. Surrounding the table, the Increo team: a group of people totally devoted to the great things we do, ready and excited to share our passion with the world.