Image:
Henk van Ruitenbeek
The company reviewed the resumes of around 50.000 students. Says founder Vincent Karremans. ‘We looked at voluntary work, board work, commissions.. everything that they had placed on their cv as extracurricular activities. And we added everything up to fulltime jobs: if somebody worked one day a week for five years, this was thus counted as one year.’
In Maastricht students spend nearly eight months on extracurricular activities, while at the Vrije University they did remarkably little next to their studies: added up, not even four months during their whole study period.
Karremans cannot conclude much about college students yet, because according to him not enough of them have signed up yet. ‘There are also many more colleges, thus this dilutes it. It might be possible next year.’
There would be 850 companies active on Magnet.me. Startups and small companies can join for free, while large companies have to pay. The company earns its money with this, according to Karremans. Magnet.me is a network that already brings students in contact with employers. They can sign up for free. In the past three years about fifty thousand students signed up.