Jakob Wikenstaal: Finding a Job in Sports (Full Transcript)
Ronen Ainbinder
Joining us today for the Halftime Snacks is a Sports Manager and Scientist who's constantly involved in technology, innovation, development, and sustainability in sports.
Coming to the show from Sweden is a man who's vision is to impact and give back to the sports community.
Today, he's the founder of Sportsidealisten. The #1 sports jobs platform helps you find your dream job in sports or find your dream candidate.
Additionally, he's a board member of the European Association for Sports Management. He co-founded the Nordic Sports Tech community.
It is an honor and a pleasure to host him in the Halftime Snacks;
Ladies and gentlemen, Jakob Wikenstaal!
Jakob Wikenstaal
Hey, Ronen! Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.
Ronen Ainbinder
Thank you, Jakob. It's amazing to connect with people from all over the world. And to host you on the halftime snacks. I want to start off with your vision that really struck an eye on me. Your vision is to make an impact and give back to the sports community. That's a very, very strong vision. And I love it. I want to ask you why? or How did you choose this vision? Or the division chose you? How are you achieving it? Let's talk a little bit about Jakob.
Jakob Wikenstaal
Sure. Growing up playing sports as most people were doing, and when they were kids back in the time from in my environment, then I was playing different sports. And I think it was late in my late teenager, times where I started to realize that. And the sport that I was participating in was actually giving me more power in social factors and leadership skills and experiences. When I was 18- 19 years old, I started thinking that some benefits are coming out than just playing for its fun. And yeah, I think we can probably talk more about it, but a thing that was the start of it, where I saw that great benefits are coming out from sports, and you could actually bring it on for the rest of your life. And if I felt this way, I think a lot more people could feel the good thing about it. Is that also why you decided to enroll yourself in the sports management degree and then go and learn more and get more involved.
Ronen Ainbinder
Was that the reason you actually said, Okay, so sports can give a lot to humans? So I want to do that. Is that how you decided that you wanted to do that?
Jakob Wikenstaal
Well, well, I think I think we can actually turn back the time when I was around 12 years old. I think this is something where it's started to scratch a little bit on my story. And basically, I was playing football, among other sports. But I think football or depending on where you're listening from, it could also be soccer. After summer, we were going back to school, and I met all my friends again. And they started to talk about the practices that it was such fun to go back and play football again. I didn't understand what they were saying because I haven't heard anything about football that the season was back or practices and so on. I lost about four or five weeks into the after the summer season, and for me, that was like I felt lost; it felt like I have already missed everything. And I think that's sad because the coaches so something the communication was obviously not the best one at the time because my family and I hadn't heard anything. Unfortunately, I think this was a way where I lost my chance to be a professional football player. But the good thing though is that this has given me power in a string to participate in other sports. And one sport that I have been taking my journey forward with during my teenage years is a Nordic sport called floorball "in Bondi," as I would say, in Swedish. However, it's a Nordic sport. It is a growing sport, but still very young. If you're coming from maybe bigger countries like the United States, France, Germany, and so on. But I was still playing that one. So for me, that was fine. And that you actually give gave me more time to focusing on floorball. And, I was, didn't really think about the football thing. And then coming a few years later on, I think this was around 1718 years old. This was the time when I started to think when I was playing floorball. And I was like, who is actually managing this club? How is everything working, because I'm just a player, I'm just going to the practice. I have coaches telling me what to do. But I started to think a little bit, arranging everything, but nothing more than that I didn't ask a lot. I just started to have those thoughts. And I had another bad experience here. I had a game where I was promised, every all the players were promised to play. And this was a tough game. And obviously, I wasn't the best one on the team. But I was still a part of the team. And I was doing well from, from my point of view, and also from my teammates. At the end of the game, we were having a lead where it was fine to put in those promised to play, but I was the only one who didn't make it on the pitch. So even though everyone will promise to play, still no one wasn't playing that game. And I didn't hear a single word or excuse of the game from the coach was, I think it's very bad. Because this breaks a lot of people down and giving this one and the first one. When I stopped playing football, those two things have given me a lot of power to change it into positive things. I have to make sure that fewer people are experiencing this sort of thing. And fast-forwarding to three years I had, I actually ended up moving abroad to California and study entrepreneurship for one year. And this started to give me additional tools in my mindset and my thinking, and I started to realize and reflect on the American culture with sports. It's totally different than what I was raised up with. And this was when I realized when I was 12 years old, I stopped playing football. Later on, I have this bad experience with the coach and not playing that actually. I can do something here. I can actually contribute to my experiences and my passion and energy to sports' greatness. So this was probably the time where I realized that I can do so much more. And even though I'm just a little, little me, I can still do a lot. I applied for sport management universities back home in Sweden. I started my journey of doing as much as I can to help more people and getting involved and the best experiences possible in sports back in 2013. That's, that's a long story, though. But I think it's important to realize that sport is not just the good things that there are unfortunate bad things and bad experiences people still have today. So I'm just trying to make more people doing the best of it. And helping more people have a good and positive association with sports.
Ronen Ainbinder
I appreciate you sharing it with us. And I'm sure it meant a lot to you when you really decided to get involved and fix the wrong things from your perspective. So I respect that. And I appreciate that, Jakob. I want to switch gears a little bit more around jobs in sports. From what I can see, you have experience in the industry, but you also have many the entrepreneur side. You founded the Nordic sports tech community, you founded a job board, and you've been doing most of the things yourself. You're trying to put tools out there for people to use. I wonder if you realized that finding jobs in sports is actually very hard or if maybe you saw an opportunity to innovate in a specific area, like hiring in sports. I want to know what do you think about that. And if that's why you decided that intrapreneurship was more the side you wanted to focus on, rather than just trying to get the best job in the industry,
Jakob Wikenstaal
I wouldn't say there's no secret to success here. I think it's a little bit starting with yourself. And, and since we're sitting here and talking, I guess I should talk from, from my point of view. And, and for me, I was just mentioning my entrepreneurship pathway from California. I think this has made me a little bit more into its entrepreneurial side. I also learned a lot of things. You just have to do a little bit from your side. And you can actually do a lot of things from that part, just believing in yourself. And, and Sure, there are great people you can get support from, but we also had our entrepreneurship course in the sport management program that I was taking part in. And, and there, I realized that I can actually take the entrepreneurship things that I learned from California and actually pop it into the sport system. And funnily enough, you can do so much more. But usually, in sports, we have been very traditional. So it's often been like, this is saying that most people are using from the traditional side of it, it's like, we've always done this. So let's keep doing it. Why changing something. And actually, what they're saying is basically, we are afraid of change, we don't like something we can't control with. And basically, from my point of view, that's the wrong way, we have to be adaptable. And this is a little bit from the entrepreneurial factors. I would say in its lifestyle that you have to just be fine with being in unsecured places, and adapt to the situation and do as best possible because the only thing you can do is the best from your side of it. And sometimes you have good timing and become a success, sometimes not. And when I also lived in Australia A few years ago, this was the end of my studies as well, where I started to look into the different job sectors in sports. And I think these have a good mix of it. Because people who are listening are thinking that sport is the dream job, keep believing that you can do it. That's the first thing. But it's also very hard to find those jobs and find a way into the job sector in sports. So if you are very creative and want to do stuff, taking the entrepreneurial pathway into sports, it's not a bad thing. It's actually a good thing because you could actually build your own experiences. So if you think you have a resume where it says there are no sports experiences in my resume, how can I get into a job in sports? Well, actually, one thing, you can build your own experiences. It's not a bad thing too; for example, in this case, have a podcast and actually learning a lot from its content creation. It's like interviewing skills. There are so many more behind the scenes that you're not thinking about. You can also run a blog, learn about research and mentioning different inspirations in sports, and share that with people; you will actually create a lot of value. I think these things shouldn't be thought of as something cheap, just a free time thing. It's actually something that you can use in your own experiences for your future work.
Coming back to the point here, entrepreneurship and sports are things that you can actually put together and work with. And in my case, I saw a lot of lack of the job market in sports. And there are very hard roles to fill in that you can easily find today. So I just thought, let's find the different jobs out there and give them to the people instead of having a hard time defining them. Basically, for me, that was, adding the entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship stuff of just do it yourself. And then trying to help as many as you can. And that could be one person that could be 20. That could be 1000. But I don't think we should forget the one person that you can actually help today. So building your own skills is one way to do it. Another way is to just use others' experience that you have and put them in a good context to showcase what you can actually do in sports and all lack of job opportunities that were out there. So I started to find them myself and give them to people.
Ronen Ainbinder
I love this concept called "permissionless work," and it is that you don't really ask for permission to do something for someone. A guy called Jack Butcher from Twitter that I follow mentions this all the time. If there's a company that you like to work for, just figure out the problem on their website or in their marketing, and just fix it. Publish it on the networks, or send it to them, or just do it and send an email to the CEO and be like, "hey, you did this wrong, here's how you should do it." That's how you actually can catch the attention of the people you want to work for or work with. And then, as you mentioned, helping other people and trying to develop your skills. I think that those are really valuable lessons, Jakob and I think I appreciate them. I'm sure the listeners appreciate them as well. And I want to know how your platform uses technology to create opportunities for both candidates and employers. What's the rationale behind the code that aims to find and connect them together?
Jakob Wikenstaal
Actually, it's very hard to find those jobs and the job seekers themselves where you can have a successful match. But, but for us, it's been a lot of what are the people wanting from the job seeker side of it. I've been coming from the beginning of the job seekers' point of view. There are so many more job seekers out there than jobs out there. And especially during a COVID situation, it's even, it's even harder than ever to, to beat the competition of getting that specific job. But for us, it's been a lot about what are our job seekers looking for? And trying to getting those jobs that are a good fit for them? But also from the job side of it. I mean, what are for them is, is a good platform to be at?
Usually, yes, of course. But then, how realistic it is, we're trying to help as many as we can. But we also know that the world is quite big. It's been a greater focus on English speaking in jobs, but also, since I'm from Sweden, I managed to get into a lot of jobs in Swedish in the Nordic countries. So, the technology can also always be developed. And I think if you've already been to Sportidealisten, then you might have seen a development from one year ago until today. Which also obsesses for everyone that we're trying to develop the technology the platform every day. And I don't think we can make it too advanced. But let's, let's put it in more of a positive and futuristic way of it. I think as if you are a job seeker out now and looking for jobs, or if you're an organization looking for hire people, or you will probably do it in the next coming years. I think it's just important to think of where do you want to spend your time. And actually, you don't want to spend your time a lot, you just want to find the job or the candidate as soon as possible. And that's what we're trying to achieve. We're trying to just give a good fit. And I think in the future, it will be even more convenient than it is today. So I think that's, that's the story so far.
Ronen Ainbinder
I want to know your opinion about LinkedIn. And I want to know if you think LinkedIn is a good tool if you think it's flawed in finding a job in the sports industry.
Jakob Wikenstaal
I think it's actually the platform for showing your professionalism or where you aim to be. They've done a great job so far with building this professional approach to it coming to jobs. I think there's a lot of great jobs out there on LinkedIn. And some of them are posted from the organization looking for it. And some are from like platforms like sports, or they listen, showing different jobs. So from a job seeker side of it, I think it's actually great opportunities out there. And it's easy because you can also show your resume, so to say, from your LinkedIn page immediately. Some use the data approach where you can apply with your LinkedIn account. Some will just do the regular suddenly in your resume on the email. So, I think it's worth it. If you have an updating profile that you're making sure that looks professional, you have a good picture. You have like a realistic title and so on. If you're thinking about a job and want to act professionally, you should start with your profile and then start to look at its job side. That's, that's one way to look at it. And for me, you shouldn't look at LinkedIn as the one thing. You should look at LinkedIn as a tool that can help you boost your carrier, either finding a job finding candidates, and so on. But don't look at us as the only one. We have to use it as a tool to help us.
Ronen Ainbinder
I feel like a good metaphor would be running shoes. You don't really need them to run. But of course, it would help you if you have them. So I guess that LinkedIn works the same way. Suppose you don't have a LinkedIn and want to work, either in some sports industry or in any other industry, tech, finance, whatever. In that case, you go ahead and open up. I feel like there's also valuing Twitter in a sense. I feel like Twitter is where you can see what someone is thinking, reading, and working in. So I also recommend opening your Twitter account and working on it as well. Since we're running out of time, I want to ask you personal and last personal question. And that is, what is one book that you read that has greatly influenced your life and why?
Jakob Wikenstaal
The book that I with me is called Factfullness. And I think you can actually find Factfullness in all different media. You can probably find great shows and talks from Hans Rosling, as well, because he's the author of the book. And to give you a short brief about it, it's basically. We are very stupid because we are not actually looking at the real facts and the real statistics and use them in the right way. So the book is basically describing the discussions that we do have in the world and actually showing that most of the people growing up today don't know anything, which's actually true. And he had done a great, great, let's say, research with, with students where he had been asking them several questions around, let's say, is the world going down when it comes to people dying and so on. And it could be about how wholistic is the different societies being developed or undeveloped, and so on. And usually, people don't know anything, they are guessing that it's worse than ever. But he shows that it's actually going well in the different tough factors that we are discussing every year. So it's a book that will open your eyes and be more critical thinking. And I think this gives me a lot of strength when it comes to making decisions and taking part in these different discussions, reading, listening to stuff that you shouldn't just believe in everything. At the first moment, we have to be critical to do sources that we read and listen to. So I think that's good advice for people to take it from there.
Ronen Ainbinder
Well, that's fantastic, Jakob! I think that's a great place to wrap today's conversation. I want to thank you for snacking with me. It was great to snack together. I learned a lot from you. You're an inspiration for up and coming generations in the sports industry. I appreciate that. So I hope once this pandemic is over, we can meet up and talk more about sports and technology. But for now, thank you for coming to the halftime snacks.
Jakob Wikenstaal
Thank you. It was good to be here.
Transcribed by Otter.