Interview with Riccardo Maggiolo, Founder and CEO of Job Club, a revolutionary approach to seek work.
The search for work can often be complex and ineffective. Among the many reasons that lead us to fail to achieve what we are looking for, there is one in particular that is not always so obvious: the inability to look for work in the right way; the inability to apply a method in our research. Job Club was born from this assumption, with the aim of creating awareness in people looking for work and to help them realize their projects of professional life.
What is Job Club and how does it work?
A Job Club is a group of 8-12 people who meet physically to seek work together, following a common laboratory method and coordinated by a trainer. The whole method is centred on reactivating and “reversing” the research approach, prompting participants to form clear professional goals and to “recruit” through self-indexing, and perhaps the construction of a project. In this way it aims to bring out the hidden labour market, which in Italy is particularly relevant. Anyone can participate in a Job Club, regardless of age, experience, preparation, and it’s free! But it requires a lot of determination and constancy to do the exercises, which are often challenging both from a practical and emotional point of view.
Why it is useful to participate in Job Clubs?
The Job Club is a completely new experience in the field of job search and is a winning formula because:
- you learn to look for work effectively
- you practise networking, meeting new people and sharing contacts and information
- you test yourself with practical and targeted exercises
- the group helps to keep yourself positive and constant in the search
The 7 rules of Job Club
Joining the platform is very simple, just sign up and select one of the available clubs. Participation in Job Clubs is completely free.
If you want to know more, read the interview with Riccardo Maggiolo, CEO of Job Club, the platform where the work is synonymous with group!
Hi Riccardo, nice to meet you and thank you for your time. Tell us more about this great project
For 8 years now, we have been helping people look for work in the best way possible: together. Over the years we have involved over 4,000 people and over 100 trainers, with collaborations with entities such as the City of Milan and the CariVerona Foundation. In the main projects the data shows that over half of the participants found work during the Job Club path, but above all the average rating to the question “Would you recommend Job Club to a friend?” It was over 9. And that, in my opinion, is the most important fact.
How and when was the idea of Job Club born?
In fact, it is an idea that is more than sixty years old, having been theorized since the early 60’s in the academic, especially psychological and sociological field. It was then periodically applied here and there in the world, but always with little continuity and projection. In fact I think this was due to a certain bias that did not consider it sensible to look for work together with others, because others were seen as competitors – as if we all could and want to do the same job – and also to the fact that the labour market in the past was quite efficient and therefore there was no need for special tools such as Job Clubs, except for people with particular fragility. Today the context has completely changed: looking for work has become the work that everyone has done – and that more and more often will be done in the future – but that no one teaches. The majority of people rely on passive methods, such as sending CV’s in response to advertisements or labor agencies, which are not only very ineffective (they broker less than 10% of the labor market) but are also very depressing. We want to spread a new culture of work and for its research: more active, positive, participatory and collaborative.
How long did it take to shape the project?
A lot. In fact, we’re probably not finished yet. We have changed three business models because our principle has always been to leave free access to the service for job seekers. You can imagine the difficulties of keeping a project up and running it without deriving economic value from its major beneficiaries. I don’t hide the fact that it took a lot of work and more than a few frustrations, but now I think we’ve really found the right path. We want to launch a network of Job Club Centers: places that are on the one hand “gyms” to learn how to look for work and on the other “shared academies” of reliable and motivated candidates for local companies. Right now we are launching the first “prototype” in our city, Vicenza.
How are users responding?
Two phases must be distinguished: before the Job Club and during the Job Club. We usually have a lot of nominations, but when we contact people and we say: “Okay, let’s go, but you have to come at least 10 times and work hard” more than someone disappears. Those who come at the beginning are wary – which is understandable – but usually very soon they get involved and are enthusiastic about the program. This, I believe, is our real added value: the ability to reactivate people, to restore their confidence in themselves and in the labour market. A fundamental precondition which, unfortunately, is very often taken for granted or even ignored.
Work is a very important issue in our country. How can your solution be really successful? What does “hidden labor market” really mean?
In Italy, over 96% of companies have fewer than 50 employees. These hardly publish an ad or go to the agency, and if they do they move almost always at the last minute, in emergency, wrong-choosing and often offering temporary contracts. Often they do not do it “with malice”, it is that they are themselves frightened both by the labour market – which appears to the employers to be full of bad candidates and without skills – and by their reference market – which appears increasingly unpredictable and competitive. So often they need to hire, and they also have money, but they don’t say it publicly: the maximum ask around (and in fact over 70% of the Italian labour market, but not only, passes through word of mouth). Our method helps not to stigmatize this aspect of the market but to exploit it, bringing out the hidden market – when the employer knows what he needs but does not say it – and the potential one – that is, when the employer still doesn’t know that a candidate can give him a competitive advantage, but the candidate makes him understand it with a self-nomination. This is why we think that our solution, if applied on a large scale, has the potential to “reverse” and restart the labour market.
How did you launch your project?
At the beginning in a very “artisan” way, organizing some Job Clubs in our vicinity. Then came the site, the formation of trainers, collaboration with important local authorities… And then the Covid came and forced us to stop. But it was a productive stop, because also thanks to some important incubation programs we were able to rethink our model in depth and now we are ready to start again. We hope to help as many people as possible by spreading our method in Italy and, why not, even abroad.
Curiosity: Has there been a Job Club over time that you have remained more attached to? If yes, which one?
There are several, and of course I did not participate directly in all. But I remember one in particular: it was held inside a psychiatric detention center. We feared that it was a too delicate group and a too difficult environment for us, but instead it was a truly enriching experience: people entered into play and really felt the protagonists of their research. It’s a good memory.
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