Business analytics with social impact.

With the development of smart dashboards, Stichting DeBroekriem will soon be able to help job-seekers in Amsterdam find jobs even better. A great project and a good learning experience for the professionals involved at ConQuaestor. Sometimes, as a job seeker, you could use some help. For example, if you suddenly find yourself without a job after a long time or if you have just left school. Then you can turn to DeBroekriem, a platform that helps you improve your job application skills, expand your network and meet new people. In recent years, DeBroekriem collected a lot of data on its members and activities, for example, the more than 500 events the foundation organizes annually throughout the country. DeBroekriem wanted to do more with all that data: what useful insights could it extract to be even more effective?

Involvement

ConQuaestor took up the gauntlet within the framework of social return on investment (SROI) initiatives by the City of Amsterdam. "The project at DeBroekriem gives us the opportunity to have social impact with our core business: supporting professionals with a background in finance and business analytics. In the process, we can also share our expertise and experience as an employment intermediary and put our core value of commitment into practice," said Amal Bouna, Business Manager at ConQuaestor.

"This project gives us the opportunity to have social impact with our core business."

Amal Bouna, Business Manager, ConQuaestor

Instant insight

A team from ConQuaestor is working at DeBroekriem to develop dashboards using the business analytics software Microsoft Power BI. The purpose of the dashboards is to give the organization quick and easy insight into the numbers and profile of activity participants: for example, how old they are, what their education is and what region they come from. But they also show which and how many activities people attended before finding a job.

Magic with data

"The professionals at ConQuaestor work magic with data. We will soon see what works well and what doesn't."

Pieter Vermeer, founder DeBroekriem

Pieter Vermeer, founder of DeBroekriem, is pleased with the work of the ConQuaestor professionals. "They are real data men. They work magic with data and create charts, maps and tables to provide us with valuable information. The real analysis work is yet to be done, but we will soon see what works well and what doesn't. That will help us serve job seekers in Amsterdam even better," he says. DeBroekriem can also use the information to show how successful its approach is. That is important to the municipalities the foundation works with, such as Amsterdam, but also to get municipalities on board that do not yet support the initiative.

Keep helping

One of the "data men" Vermeer refers to is Jeroen Ganseij, finance professional at ConQuaestor. Together with senior business analysts Rombout Veldhoven and Elias Soume, he enthusiastically delved into DeBroekriem's data. "We created several dashboards. They are very dynamic and interactive, you can look at the data from all kinds of angles and click deeper and deeper into details. Incredibly fun to do, because you are helping people who are in a difficult situation, but also very educational. For example, we enriched the data from DeBroekriem with external data that had a different structure. I had no experience with that, it was quite difficult."

"The assignment at DeBroekriem is useful to me, because analytics is the future in finance."

Jeroen Ganseij, medior finance professional, ConQuaestor

The project has helped Jeroen develop further. "The assignment at DeBroekriem is a very useful experience. Especially because analytics is the future, as a finance professional you don't want to be dependent on data analysts. I will now start another assignment, but if possible I would like to stay involved in this project for a few hours a week."