Category: Career

The biggest world wide job search engine CareerJet is now also available for the Russian job market. Careerjet searches for all vacancies at Dutch interim offices, newspapers, companies and other job websites. The list of vacancies is then shown based on the criteria of the person looking for a job. This list refers a person to the original job offer where one can apply for the job immediately.

Business social network LinkedIn places network updates in a personal RSS feed . This means that changes to business contacts can be accessed immediately from webpages, RSS readers or email clients. Changes include such things as: 'a new job', 'a new contact' or 'a new question'. This allows people to be presented such things in the same way as 'news', but with the difference that this is much nearer to them.

37% of the (Dutch) people looking for a job prefer an online career convention to a traditional venue, reports a survey from totaljobs.nl. According to the survey outcome, the primary reasons to visit an online convention are: the ability to look at job openings and apply immediately (74%), the ease of visiting the convention at one's own speed from behind a computer (56%) and the fact that the convention is available for a prolonged period of 24 hours (53%). The most important reason why people still choose to visit a traditional convention is the personal contact with employers (93%). This gives people an image of what kind of people are employed at a specific organization.

Business social network LinkedIn introduces company profiles (see below for details, li). A lot of information that hasn’t been available before has now been published. Furthermore, LinkedIn offers companies the possibility to add information. LinkedIn thus pushes the brand coming out for all companies, meanwhile becoming more and more relevant as a personal career brand: a brand that helps you in your career.

Dutch professional marketing magazine MarketingTribune and leading Dutch marketing community MarketingFacts (of which I am one of the contributers) have signed a strategic partnership (mf). Publishers transform to be community managers. The community becomes leading, and paper is just a copy for background and entertainment. In the long run MarketingFacts can grow to be a personal career brand for marketers. By bringin together all the news, showing all jobs and all events, and making these relevant for the individual marketer, the personal development of the marketer can be carefully coached. A server the marketer will be willing to pay for (and not so much for the paper he gets in his mailbox at home). I wonder what the new title of the magazine will be (MarketingTribune, Facts from the daily marketing practice?).

Business-social network LinkedIn shows what your colleagues have read lately. It combines the contact list with news on demand. The amount of job offers rises at the same time (dc, Dutch). Because of this you don’t just see the important events in the world, but especially the important events in your surroundings. After all employees are not just employees, but especially humans. And humans are involved in their surroundings. Now for news, later also for participation in events, reviews of books or education. LinkedIn thus further develops to be a personal career brand, a brand that helps you during your whole career.

New Dutch vacancy website Baneninbeeld.nl completely consists of filmed job advertisements. The films are made professionally (tm, Dutch). Brands start to communicate more visually. This fits with human nature: this is what humans are designed for. Over thousands of years we have bit by bit learned to use the written word. Now video is possible, so humans follow their natural motives: thinking in images. There are many more video examples to follow.

Dutch newcomer Lootzy is a vertical search engine for jobs. Lootzy however doesn’t search job sites: it searches companies’ web pages. A company which has a job opening puts the job description at its own web site (this so happens anyway) and Lootzy puts it in its index (am, Dutch). This way, Lootzy will soon be on its way to completeness. Especially if through standardization of specific web pages (like a vacancy page) Lootzy will be able to gather very specific details of the jobs (full time or part time, exact location, what kind of organization, etc.). Offering the complete supply, Lootzy can then develop into a personal career brand and have itself represented by a personal brand agent. You can already see its face.

If companies become more and more international, and their interests in strategy, creation, production, and distribution are globalized, how can a labor union still be a valuable discussion partner? How can a company that increasingly has to compete with India and China, listen to ONE labor union that has only one goal: to keep its members in the Netherlands (or another western country) satisfied. In this situation it is merely impossible for a company to keep a lot of people employed in only one country. It is all about adding value to the lives of people world wide, as an employer as well as a supplier. National labor unions will lose their power as discussion partners, and it looks like there is only one solution: an international labor union. A point of focus for personal career brands? 

Dutch broadcast organization BNN is going to make people smarter. Presenter Katja Schuurman in the show Get Smarter in A Week will show it is really possible to become a little bit smarter. Famous and infamous Dutch people will get intensive training and spectacular exercises to learn to use their brains anew (ld, Dutch). TV programs are virtual experiences: experiences from a distance. They become more and more personal. Now still for big groups of people, in the future we will follow a personal training with a small group of people, live or not live. A training maybe 10,000 people will follow at the same time, and pay for with big bucks. But we will get smarter through the training, so it is worth it. Now it is still content for big groups of people, on a small budget; in the future content will deliver meaningful experiences for people to carry on with. The selection of the right experiences in this area will be the point of attention for personal career brands, brands which help us in our personal development. This is a small step in that direction.