Professional
Q. What is your work experience and education?
Check out my LinkedIn.
Q. Are you open for new positions?
If I am, I'll shout on LinkedIn. At the moment, I'm not actively looking. My current role at Volvo Cars checks all the boxes for me right now. Most of the cold-calls I get don't make any sense career-wise for me, so please do your research.
Q. Are you open for Mentorship?
Mentorship is a two way street, so if I can map it to my personal growth plan, I'm interested. A good way to see what I'm interested to learn is to check out my notes which show the areas I am learning.
Q. Can you refer me to your current company?
I stopped doing referrals since 2018 for these reasons:
If we haven't worked together I cannot put a word beyond the fact that you've reached out for a referral --which is as strong as reaching out to the recruiter directly, or applying online. The referral forms at any decent company have specific questions that digs into our relationship and how closely we have worked together and how you rate compared to others I have worked with. Obviously I cannot lie.
Even if we had worked together before, beware that a referral ties your reputation to mine. Considering that I'm vocal about calling bullsh*t, this may work against your application.
Many companies have monetary incentives for their referral program to motivate employees to bring in their contacts. I don't take part in the referral program because I believe it's fundamentally wrong. If a company is good enough, it should be able to attract the right people without throwing money at it. I myself approach job opportunities coming from friends suspeciously for that exact reason.
If you're applying to my current employer because you like what I write (thanks for that), beware that your experience at a company is highly impacted by your manager and the team you end up working with. I'm happy where I am but that doesn't mean you're going to be happy too.
Personal
Q. How is your last name pronounced?
It has 3 syllabus and is pronounced like:
/ea/ (like "ear")
/ver/ (like "version")
/love/ (well that's close enough)!
Q. Are you married? Do you have kids?
Happily married and have 2 kids.
Q. Where do you live?
I'm a Swedish citizen based in Stockholm.
Q. How old are you?
Mind the bias.
Q. Where are you from?
Mind another bias (to be written and linked)
Booking
Q. Why do you charge for booking?
As my online presence span outside my country, I get a lot of requests for advice and running workshop that sound great, but it also cost me my most finite resource: time.
Having paid sessions enables me to:
Fend off the less serious requests
Motivate spending time in face to face sessions as opposed to my usual channel which is much more scalable and almost free. This is especially important because I have a full-time job and for me to take a meeting outside work, I have to take time off or work extra later.
Get compensated for the value I provide
Q. Why are there different prices?
The price is set based on the discussion I had with my network and historical payments. As a general rule: the more preparation I have to do and the more people involved, the higher the price.
Q. Can I book a free call?
Only if we have agreed in advance and I've explicitly asked to book a free call.
Disclaimer: I may cancel the free calls in short notice depending on my workload and other priorities.
Q. How do I book you?
Via the contact page. Stripe handles the payments.
Q. I want to dispute the payment. What should I do?
Get in touch via the contact page.
Q. What is your refund policy?
The official policy is this: meetings that are cancelled in less than 4h before the scheduled time by client are not refundable.
If you cancel before that, you get 80% refund. The other 20% is to cover the cost of manually reversing the transaction via Stripe. You'll get a receipt when that's done.
Content
For more questions about collaborations on articles, podcast, presentations, etc. as well as writing advice, see the Blog FAQ.