Pool Your Learning

We are a recruitment marketplace specialising in junior job seekers and graduates. Our project idea is to create a bridge for job seekers who are struggling to start a promising career in the present climate. We will deliver a unique range of study courses for graduates, developed in collaboration with employers, targeting the "soft learning" that graduates experience on their first job. Task-oriented, technical training programs exist already, but graduate trainees struggle with problems like communication style, interpreting instructions and anticipating the needs of their colleagues. We will offer assessed coursework focussing on these "soft skills". Rather than charging for the training, we will offer it free, and we will profit from the goodwill and value that it adds to our recruitment marketplace in the longer term. Graduates who participate will have their work scored by us and by our community of employers.

While we hope to see the extinction of the coronavirus soon, the lingering economic effects of the virus are likely to hurt graduates more than most. During these difficult times, we want to give satisfying and meaningful opportunities to graduates and to support them on the first steps of their careers.

We will deliver novel, practical courses to "simulate" the soft-learning that graduates and junior staff experience during their first job. For the duration of the COVID-19 crisis, our platform [TalentPool.com][0] will be refocussed on connecting junior-level job seekers with online training opportunities. The nature of this training would be practical tasks, carried out online and relevant to the job areas in which the candidate is interested in working in.

The aims of this project are two-fold:

1. To equip job seekers with the skills and knowledge they need to increase their chances of getting hired both during the crisis and after.

2. To support businesses (especially our traditional subscriber base of SMEs) who are hiring during the crisis by helping them to train their new starters in tasks that they would otherwise, in more normal circumstances, learn on the job. This could help maintain employment levels if remote working continues indefinitely.

The societal impact of the project would be to keep UK job seekers engaged and competitive while hiring remains on hiatus. Up-skilling junior-level job seekers not only increases their long-term employability, but it also puts UK business in a stronger position to bounce back from the crisis.

See: http://talentpool.com/