Engagement
As a job seeker, sometimes you can use a little help. For instance, you may have been out of work after a long period of time or you may have just finished school. This is where DeBroekriem comes in. The foundation provides a platform that helps you improve your job application skills, expand your network and meet new people. In recent years, DeBroekriem has gathered vast amounts of data about its members and its activities, such as the more than 500 events that the foundation organises throughout the country each year. DeBroekriem wanted to do more with all of this data: what useful insights could the foundation derive from it to be even more effective in its work?
Social impact
ConQuaestor took up the mantle within the framework of social return on investment (SROI) initiatives in the municipality of Amsterdam. “The project at DeBroekriem gives us the opportunity to make a social impact using our core business: by providing support from professionals with a background in finance and business analytics. We can also share our expertise and experience as an employment intermediary and put our core value of engagement into practice,” explains Amal Bouna, Business Manager at ConQuaestor.
Direct insight
A team from ConQuaestor started working at DeBroekriem to develop dashboards using the business analytics software Microsoft Power BI. The purpose of the dashboards is to give the foundation quick and easy insight into the figures and profiles relating to those taking part in the activities, for example how old they are, what education they have and what region they come from. Not only this, but they also show the number and details of activities people have completed before they find a job.
Working magic with data
Pieter Vermeer, founder of DeBroekriem, is pleased with the work of the professionals from ConQuaestor. “They really are data experts. They turn data into graphs, maps and tables to provide us with valuable information. The real analysis still needs to be done, but we will soon see what works well and what works less well. That will help us to serve jobseekers in Amsterdam even more effectively,” he says. DeBroekriem can also use the information to show how successful its approach is. This is important for the municipalities that the foundation works with, such as Amsterdam, but it is also important for convincing those local authorities that do not yet support the initiative.
Keep on helping
One of the ‘data experts’ that Vermeer referred to is Jeroen Ganseij, who works as a finance professional at ConQuaestor. Together with senior business analysts Rombout Veldhoven and Elias Soume, he dived into DeBroekriem’s data with great enthusiasm. “We have created various dashboards. They are very dynamic and interactive, and you can view the data from a number of different aspects and delve deeper into the details if needed. It has been great fun because you can help people who are in a difficult situation, but it is also very informative. For example, we enriched DeBroekriem’s data with external data that had a different structure. I had no experience with that and it was quite difficult.”
The project has helped Jeroen to develop. “The assignment at DeBroekriem has been a very useful experience. Especially since analytics is the future – as a finance professional, you don’t want to have to rely on data analysts. I’m going to be starting another assignment now, but, if I can, I’d still like to spend a few hours a week on this project.”