Whether you are on LinkedIn or Viadeo, your account is like a dating profile for job recruiters. Some of us use attention-grabbing headlines or upload various publications to improve our own click-through-ratings. CEO’s like Richard Branson have profiles with intriguing past experiences and various memberships to exclusive organizations. I especially love reconnecting with old friends and alums from college. These professional social networks have a huge appeal by establishing virtual professional networking connections with colleagues, clients and friends.
But, what if there was a website that took apart all of the profiles on professional networking sites and organized their credentials into projects instead? What if the purpose of the site was to find work not just look at how pretty we all looked on a digital flyer? According to the start-up, twago, professional services offered in their cloud network can seamlessly harness hundreds of thousands of freelance experts to work on an estimated 17,825 projects currently listed in France. They want to disrupt the jobs social networking market by offering a more productive way of finding work instead of mindlessly pruning a jobs profile with the hope that this may virtually solve all of society’s problems by proactively fighting unemployment rates.
“France is an exciting and major market…the country has such a big potential with approx. 10 percent of the working people in France being self-employed freelancers or agencies driving the French GDP every year. And the future is promising: A study for the US says that 30 out of 100 working people will work online as freelancer in the next couple of years, nine of ten companies will use the work of freelancers. We expect a similar development for the EU.”
-Gunnar Berning, CEO of twago
If you haven’t searched yet on their site (all of you reading this), it’s fun-go ahead and play around with what you can find. For example, I hate chess and so I decided why not see if some idiot is trying to develop a chessboard app. OK, yes there is a German entrepreneur developing a chessboard game for the iPad iOS. I know this is a lame example but you might discover something you truly love to do on this site simply because there is a team beginning work on an idea or vision you share! How invaluable is a tool that focuses on projects, actual work, than on contributing to an aimless self-congratulatory professional networking site? Yes, by 2013, we have all successfully promoted ourselves in contributing to an online curation of a 180 million professional yearbook!