Contrato indefinido vs trabajador indefinidamente contratable

Reflexión breve.

Ayer estuve en una reunión en la que al final de la misma expliqué una de mis motivaciones para trabajar en innovación "estar siempre en la cresta de la ola preparado por si alguna vez tengo que cambiar de empleo tener recorrido por delante".


Ante esta respuesta, la interlocutora me espetó: "Justamente esta es la diferencia entre un trabajador con contrato indefinido y un trabajador indefinidamente contratable".

Me gustó!

Converting text to an image. InfoJobs Visual CV, an innovation sample of the Visual Resumé

Recently, at InfoJobs we have rolled out the Visual CV(or Visual Resumé), a new concept of the traditional curriculum vitae (the European version of the American resumé).

The etimology of the word suggests that the word currilum vitae in latin means the course of my life. Behind this definition there's the idea of having a timeline of your life, a record of every milestone of your work life or taking a modern approach, a movie of your life.

There're other approaches to a Visual CV's done by creative people that's show their hability to sum up and represent information in a short space. But some of them are specially thought to represent a particular information and demonstrate the creativity of the creator.

But until now, I haven't seen any Visual CV that has been industrialized in any Job Portal or any Professional Network.

The InfoJobs Visual CV has a lot of benefits. Some of them are:

• Objective information: the interpretation of the information don't depends of the recruiter.
• Easy and fast to read: increase productivity.
• Easy to detect errors: for candidates and recruiters.
• Visual information is multilingual
• And more...

I'm sure that after this first release some sites will copy + paste this idea, because is easy and more or less each job portal has the same information of the candidates. This competition will boost the innovation in creating new formats for Visual CV, and perhaps at the end a new standard will be adopted.

To arrive at version of the Visual CV or Visual Resume this point we did an interesting innovation exercise of collecting feedback of the customers and providing diferents versions of the CV to check if we were in the right path.

Here you can see some of the discarted proposals of the Visual Resume, some of them with interesting features.

Versión 1 of the Visual Resumé

Versión 2 of the Visual Resumé

This second versión of the Visual CV has some interesting features that crosses and hightlights the job offer with the characteristics of the candidate to make easier to the recruiter identify the strenghts and de weakeness of the user with out doubt.

Session with users: The Naked Truth and Pretotyping practices

Today, I've participated in a work session with candidates at InfoJobs, what we call "Mesa de Trabajo con Candidatos".
As a company, we do this kind of meetings regulary, at least once a month, to get candid, hot and real information of our users about our products, new services or developments.
Inquiring people of flesh and bones we can get these nuances that we can't get from a cold email or information fulfilled in a form.
Despite these positive aspects, sometimes this kind of meeting can be a bit frustrating (at the beginning).
Imagine you are the owner of a product that you have conceibed after a big research, lots of hours of work with  hard illusion, thinking that your product is the best ever invented in the whole world. Then you show a prototype of your product to a group of users. . . but they have some troubles to understand, to use, to apreciate the value. . .
The world falls on you.
This is The Naked Truth, the moment of the truth, the real world!
What one designs over a sheet of paper should be tested at the early stages of its live to check whether the product is well underway or not and stop the project or reorient it. More or less, this is the idea of Pretotyping  Manifesto.
After the first frustration feeling (because the idea is rejected, bad implemented or something similar. . . ), a new world of opportunities appears in front of you. Imagine the same situation at the end of the project, just before the launching process! I never wouldn't be there!

Keeping this on mind you are collecting valuable information at the begining of the project and you can solve some small and cheap issues at this stage of the project. Correcting the same issues at the end of the project should be more difficult and expensive.

Moral of the tale

1. takes every opportunity to receive real feedback; 
2. the small detail can convert your product in a failure product or a sucess product; 
3. let users express with their words, don't conditionate their thougths; 
4. repeat the exercise after each improvement to see if the new implementation corrects the precious errors; save money with this approach; 
5. don't lie yourself, your users can't all the world: identify the right users for your product and then use the right style and tone to communicate with your users.

The value of data

These days I'm reading the book Bursts: The hidden pattern behind everything We do. This is a really and inspirational book that make's one self to reflection a bit.
As much you read, more conviced you get about the value and the need to record as much data as possible.

If you have a web site and you records registers, you'll agree with me that only one register don't helps you to discover anything special, but if you have a hightly web site, as much you read more knowledge you'll get.
Sometimes people make a mistake wondering to record complex information. Often with simple data you can work a lot.
Some examples:

• Registering the gender of your users: if you have Advertising in your site you could segment your campaings getting better results. 
• Registering historical data: here you could find the changes along the life of your customer. If you detect similar patterns, you could predict the future and you could identifty which customers will have the same behaviour in the future 
• And even more... 

One interesting sample about the amount of knowledge that produces a silly experiment is the web Where's George. The idea of the site is that people registers the numbers of the bill's and the place where one recived the bill. With this simple action they have enought information to predict the movement of people and the spread of an hypotetical disease. With this "game" we're discovering our movement pattern that can be used to define strategies to prevent disease.

Image of an Air Hub

I'm trying to apply that in the Career Planning Arena as a way to help people to improve their career, to be more prepared for the future and more ambitious to help my country be more competitive and decrease the huge unemployement rate (over 20% average, but near 60% on youngest people!!!).
The idea is to get information about the professional careers of the people, that means a lot of CVs for example and analyze it with modern SNA techniques. I have this information, but some of them is low quality data.
But if you don't have this information stored on your Database, what can you do?

• Start a proces to get the information that you need on a web site (I'm sure the data will be valuable, but you'll waste a lot of time).
• Go to social media sites and start to crawl personal information. Today is quite easy to crawl a site like Facebook or Linked In, and the information that they have is quite good to start.

What that means is that tomorrow everyone could develop a career plan site.
Why? Because on internet there is a huge and open amount of almost open information, and these will be a norm (Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, . . .)
Technology is everyday easier to manage and Cloud Computing raises down the prices to rent a server. What that means is that more people could be able to start a simple business from good and authentic ideas.
Today there are some sites that are starting to get the first results.
Companies that were big in the past but they didn't do their homework could disapear if they don't reorient their business.