Mirjam Bours-Jongen on the Digital Recruitment course

Mirjam Bours-Jongen (63) has worked at the Municipality of Kerkrade in various positions all her life. In 2000, she switched to the P&O department and decided to study Human Resources Management. Due to the tight labor market, they also noticed at the Limburg municipality that vacancies were increasingly difficult to fill. To break new ground Mirjam decided to take the Digital Recruitment course at Adwise Academy. It turned out to be a bull's eye.

You don't often meet people like Mirjam anymore: in four years time she will retire with the same employer where she started as an eighteen year old after high school. She started in an administrative position in the Internal Affairs department, followed by various positions in different departments. She was also the first person at the Municipality of Kerkrade to be allowed to work part-time after the birth of her children. Until her children got a little older, she worked there 26 hours a week, then went back to work full-time. "The thing I like most about my employer is that there is so much to do and you can take on new roles all the time. You can get a taste of everything here and keep developing yourself," Mirjam says.

In 2000, she started her college education in Personnel & Employment and started working as a personnel consultant. Working and learning at the same time went easily for her. And in fact, it still does. "I may be 63 already, but that doesn't mean I'm dead. You're never too old to learn," she says enthusiastically.

The Municipality of Kerkrade is also beginning to notice the effects of the ever-tightening labor market in our country. "I notice that we get fewer and fewer letters. We simply have to try harder to fill our vacancies. Because I would like to break new ground and tap into new target groups, I decided to look into training in the field of Digital Recruitment."

She thought it would be useful to make use of the STAP budget, the government subsidy of up to 1,000 euros per year for training, courses and education. STAP stands for STimulering Arbeidsmarkt Positie and this scheme should offer employed or job-seekers more chances to keep their job or find a new one. "My employer obviously also thought this was a good idea and through the website of the UWV, which handles the subsidy application, I stumbled upon the Digital Recruitment training course from Adwise Academy."

Mirjam had never heard of Adwise Academy before - which is not surprising when you live in Kerkrade and Adwise's headquarters are in Almelo - but when she read about the training, she became more enthusiastic by the minute. "It's nice that it's a solid 8-week course, covering all aspects of digital recruitment in sessions of 3 hours each. And that it was blended learning, where you could choose whether to come to the classroom or log in from home or the office, also appealed to me."

She even attended two sessions from her vacation home. "That went fine. They had the infrastructure for online learning in place just fine!". She is most pleased with the quality of the instructors. "They were extremely skilled, and each of them had a lot of enthusiasm for the subject. That's very contagious." The group size is a maximum of 14 people, but Mirjam was in a class of nine, all from different backgrounds. "That diversity just made it extra fun."

During the training, there is a focus on what the shift to a candidate market means due to increasing tightness. Reaching suitable people is already a task; convincing them is downright a tough challenge. Using the latest technologies and methods, trainees learn how to search, find and engage (future) employees even better online. Participants get an introduction to the world of digital recruitment and go deeper into trends and developments within this field. They also start with defining a strategy and writing an employer journey. The following topics will be covered:

Recruitment Strategy & Candidate journey
Developing a concept for a job site or page for a recruitment campaign
Two session Modern job writing
Google Ads & Job Boards
Advertising via Social
Hints & Digital Communication
Innovations in e-recruitment (Chatbots, automatic selection tools, tools for writing and applying through voice, etc)

According to Mirjam, the curriculum is well-balanced and allows her to immediately apply the knowledge she has gained in practice. "For example, I learned how to write appropriate and modern job ads that appeal to the target audience. The different generations on the job market demand different forms of writing style and social media, so you have to take this into account. As a Kerkrade municipality, we immediately started working with this for a vacancy for a P&O consultant, and that yielded a good number of serious responses."

Furthermore, she has learned that recruitment is actually a synonym for marketing. "Especially in a tight labor market, you will have to pull out all the stops to sell your brand as an employer. Kerkrade still sometimes suffers from an image problem. We are facing a great challenge to change this into a more positive image. Kerkrade also has a lot of great things to offer, just think of Roda JC, GaiaZOO, Rolduc Abbey, the Botanical Garden, various music festivals such as the World Music Competition, you name it. In order to raise Kerkrade's profile as an employer, I am in close consultation with the marketing and communications department."

"It's a nice idea that you can always turn to the instructors."

Last month, Mirjam earned the Digital Recruitment certificate at Adwise Academy. "It's a nice idea that you can always knock on the teachers' door if you have any questions and that you can still watch the recordings of the lessons back. Ideally I would like to have another return day, where everyone talks about what it has given them and you can keep each other on their toes, because falling back into your old pattern is of course always lurking."

She is already eager to do a follow-up course on digital recruitment. "I think I would then like to go into more depth with the opportunities that social media offer in the field of recruitment. Then I will definitely knock on Adwise Academy's door again, because they have pleasantly surprised me."

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"Recruiting = Marketing"