Mep | Jobs Blog

JobBridge could only work if…

With JobBridge in the news again I couldn’t resist to clearly put myself in the ranks of those who are against it. Not like the Socialist Pary members like Paul Murphy MEP who writes JobBridge to nowhere! (I like the article!), but quite close to it. The internship scheme is a good idea and could work quite well if done right. The one we have today is very, very far from it. It is no surprise it is causing such all these troubles for the government, with the majority of people expressing themselves unusually vocally about it. And the majority of the votes are the NO votes for the national internship programme.

The internship programme could actually work well. If… If the rules are set right. Imagine that a company can ONLY get an intern if the intern will be doing exactly what the company specialises in, and if the intern will learn skills during the internship that will make him the very attractive hire for the same company he got an internship from? To put this in real life example the rules should look somewhat like this:

1. No internships for the jobs that are paid minimum wage (by that same company). Why? The government has a chance to get unemployed placed in the job and it should aim highest possible paid ones.
2. Internship can be offered where the work performed is one of the core skills of the company. A marketing company can have a marketing intern, not a web designer. A web design company can have a web designer as an intern, not a marketing person. Why? Simply because the internship is there for the intern to learn.
3. Strictly no receptionist, admin, PA, and similar internships.
4. A company must provide a Mentor for the intern. Such a mentor should prove he/she will dedicate 10% of the working time to the Intern for the training. A mentor must be a senior staff member (in years of experience) and have the skills relevant to the internship.

The internship should be exactly the same as the initial training a new hire gets in the first few months on the job. It would give the company an extended period to test and try the intern before they make a hire. A trained intern after 6 months of the internship should be a far more interesting hire than a new candidate since the company has already invested in the intern who is ready to start the work immediately (or has been doing it for the months already).

Wouldn’t this make far more sense than the Internship programme we have today?

Twitter is a social network that lets the users communicate with messages of only up to 140 characters. SMS-ish like. When you register you can follow other people and what happens when you follow them – whatever they write is shown on your profile. You actually subscribe to their updates. Other people can follow you and that enables you to place your message on their Twitter profile page. Altogether twitter is a tool taht delivers short message from a user to a group of users who subscribe for this updates.

The description above actually describes a fantastic marketing tool. You can subscribe to whoever you like, and get their messages. Anyone else can subscribe to you. It is a massive permission based marketing model, dressed up as a social network.

Twitter can be used as a marketing channel to market anything. A business, a brand, a product, or a person. In fact it is used in personal branding right now in Ireland with candidates marketing themselves on Twitter just nine days before the Elections for the European parliament.

Here is how candidates from the Dublin constituency use Twitter to market themselves to the Irish voters.

Another interesting aspect , besides the number of followers and following, is the Activity. How many messages or broadcasts to their followers have each candidate made so far?

Name	Number of Tweets
Déirdre De Búrca	259
Eoin Ryan	144
Joe Higgins	160
Proinsias De Rossa	44
Eibhlin Byrne	30
Caroline Simons	n/a
Mary Lou Mc Donald	n/a
Patricia McKenna	n/a
Gabriel ´Gay´ Mitchell	n/a

The article Twitter and European Elections in Dublin South shows the number of followers and people following – or basically a ‘Broadcast Network’ of each candidate. You can clearly see that the number of messages published is in direct correlation with the number of people following you.

So how to use Twitter in the recruitment or looking for job? Simple! Just log in, create your account, look for interesting people, follow them, publish the messages you want to be found and followed for. The more messages you post to the larger and ‘more interesting’ network, the more effective will your Twitter marketing be.

Do not forget how are you presenting yourself as well. There is a full Profile you can fill on Twitter about yourself.

Make sure you do not put a face of a dog instead of your photo as the
Major of Dublin did, since people will be quite reluctant to follow a dog!?