Loopbaan
““As a highly marketing-orientated company we have many advantages in using Sitecore because we can schedule multiple online marketing campaigns at the same time. Sitecore helps us to fully service our clients.” ”
-Annemarie van Duynhoven, CEO, Loopbaan BV.
Summary
Loopbaan is a recently founded company entering the tough environment of online job portals by offering an added dimension to the service. Sitecore was chosen to allow the company to quickly implement a broad range of services immediately and allow scope to extend these rapidly to respond to market needs.
Challenge
At the end of 2004 Loopbaan received investment funding to establish a new style of portal to service the job-market in the Netherlands. The key challenge was to break the traditional short-range model of matching job seekers with potential employers and, instead, develop long-term relationships with both the companies offering jobs and the individuals themselves.
Therefore the proposal was to create a portal that gave additional value in two areas;
Firstly more scope was given to the companies offering job posts such that they could promote both the job available, and their company.
Secondly, individuals, even after they had successfully found gainful employment would be encouraged with a range of services to maintain ongoing communication with the portal.
As a start-up enterprise, Loopbaan also required the site to be up and running as quickly as possible, within a strict budget.
Solution
The portal obviously satisfies the basic commitment to match employers and potential employees. However, Loopbaan meaning literally “career” in Dutch, nurtures subscribers through both personal and career development in an ongoing manner. This is achieved by providing visitors with some additional features namely:
· Work and Life: Includes online tests, provided by external consultants
· Training and Development: online booking of training courses provided by specialists
· Bookshop: managementboek.nl catalogue integrated directly into Loopbaan
· Seminars & Training: Industry specific seminars from locations and providers across the Netherlands
Loopbaan subscribers are also able to set-up their “My Loopbaan” which holds their CV information, job applications, and a personalised, custom list of tests, books, and other information they have assembled. This can then selectively be made available to potential employers.
Companies advertising posts on the website are obviously given the ability to post information regarding the position, but further than that, they can for example profile their company or run the potential candidates though custom online questionnaires – a mini company website of sorts.
In order to keep both the companies and subscribers up to dates the immensely successful Yourzine newsletter product has also been incorporated into the portal.
Companies advertising posts on the website are obviously given the ability to post information regarding the position, but further than that, they can for example profile their company or run the potential candidates though custom online questionnaires – a mini company website of sorts.
In order to keep both the companies and subscribers up to dates the immensely successful Yourzine newsletter product has also been incorporated into the portal.
Result
The site was launched it the beginning of March 2005 and already only one month after had 2.800 unique visitors per day.
The focus on ongoing personal development has proved overwhelmingly popular, and in fact has attracted a large number of female subscribers.
The ability of companies to provide more than just job information, but also test candidates prior to CV selection is considered a valuable tool, and a rapidly growing number of employers are content to pay the monthly subscription.
The ability to rapidly update information in Sitecore combined with integrated Yourzine newsletter functionality (www.yourzine.nl) has allowed the company to roll out new and multiple marketing campaigns. This has been essential during the start-up phase for the Loopbaan
Technical Description
The loopbaan.nl site utilizes a dedicated multi-tier and multi-threaded .NET business solution next to, and integrated with, Sitecore. While this business-layer handles the 'complex' logic and dedicated database access (Microsoft SQL) that requires a custom-build solution, Sitecore is used to marshal all requests, handle security and display the desired information to the end-users by merging the output streams from both the CMS and the business-layer.
Next to this the Sitecore- CMS let itself easily expand to facilitate for an administrative section, resulting in a seamless integrated interface for our customer to manage the database and thus keep up to date with their rapidly changing business-demands.
With the wide field of techniques (and security) at our disposal through .Net and Sitecore, Loopbaan.nl is now a high performance, fully functional, expandable and perhaps even more important, fully flexible system, complete with XML-import/export facilities to third parties.
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