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Computer Futures (hereafter CF) is a brand that belongs to the SThree Group. SThree is an international recruitment specialist that was founded in 1986, in London. The group presently owns eight different recruitment brands, including CF. Each brand specializes in different industries and SThree operates globally in 15 countries: UK & Ireland, Continental Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific and the Middle East with 41 offices. SThree works with approximately 7,500 clients and has around 2850 employees around the globe (SthreeReport, 2015). While SThree manages multi-brand strategy that builds expertise, the organization maintains its focus on niche sectors that allows them to provide quality service. The organization is constantly growing, adding each year around three new offices globally. Their focus used to be exclusively on the ICT sector; however they currently derive around 59% of their gross profit from Accountancy & Finance, Banking, Engineering, Energy, and Life Sciences (SthreeReport, 2015).

The majority of the organization’s business comes from providing skilled contractors to organizations who need niche skills for temporary assignments. The services cover different areas, from filling roles to providing payroll services and ensuring full regulatory compliance for all parties. CF specialties are; IT recruitment, Software tester jobs, IT Jobs, IT contract roles, IT permanent roles, Analyst jobs, .NET jobs, PHP jobs, C# jobs, SAP jobs, Microsoft SQL, Java jobs, Oracle jobs, Web Development jobs, IT manager, Head of IT jobs (Computer-Futures, 2016). CF has two divisions: Contract and Permanent. The contract division focuses on hiring candidates that work temporarily, their placement lasts between one and 12 months. The permanent division focuses on long-term jobs where the candidate and the client are looking for collaboration; these are generally 1+ year. CF’s market had changed enormously in 2015; the IT recruitment market changed from a client-driven market to a candidate-driven market. This means that the balance of power has changed; good candidates are more scarce and demand more from their employers (ter Haar, 2016).

The current system requires a lot of manual labor from CF employees because the system finds candidates solely based on their location and keywords mentioned in their CV’s. Therefore, it is possible that when a recruiter search for a developer in Rotterdam, the Salesforce candidate system returns a candidate that used to be developer 12 years ago. This makes the search of fitting candidate tedious, inaccurate and unreliable. A similar situation occurs in the Salesforce client database, when recruiters search for a company that need a specific project completed, the system might not have an updated list of companies’ current vacatures. Thus recruiters are searching for weeks until they finally finds a company and are missing companies that were not on the list. This is inefficient, expensive and time-consuming for CF.

Since August 2016, CF has a new department called the Outsourcing Team (hereafter OT) that focuses on the outsourcing of IT professionals. IT outsourcing concerns the outsourcing of all or parts of the IT functions to an external party (ter Haar, 2016). CF provides professionals in this field to clients. Firstly, CF will hire a number of IT candidates and will need to attract enough top talent with specific IT skills that are able to undertake IT related work such as programming to other companies.

In order to avoid having candidates “sitting on the bench” without a project, we propose the use of a platform that will match CF’ IT candidates with CF clients. This will enable on one hand, companies to look for the right candidate with the relevant skills for the job and on the other hand, candidates to choose the project that is better suited for them. The main purpose of the platform would be to match candidates of the OT with available project of companies, this way candidates will be able to indicate whether or not they are willing to take the job and clients’ project would be visible out in the open for the OT candidates’ pool.

Sources:

• Computer-Futures. (2016). computer futures linkedin page . Opgehaald van: https://www.linkedin.com/company/computer-futures
• Computer Futures. (2016). www.computerfutures.com. Opgehaald van About us: http://www.computerfutures.com/en/about-us/diversity
• ter Haar, A (2016, October). Computer Futures thesis supervisor and HR Manager. (A. Barry, Interviewer)

 

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Have you ever wondered what the house of the future will look like? Think about the smart technology we already have in our cars. If you’re low on gas, the indicator light switches on. If you’re short on oil, another indicator will tell you that you need to check your engine. All of this information helps keeping the car in good condition, and the driver safe.

Our homes still aren’t as technologically advanced as we wished but we certainly have already moved forward. Think about in-home stereo, programmable thermostats or the new Amazon Echo, a smart speaker device capable of voice interaction, music playback, setting alarms, streaming podcast and many other services.

What if you’d come home after work and just needed to push one button to adjust the lighting of your entire house. The lights go on in the kitchen, the living room, a few hallways, and that’s it, no need to touch your lights again (Future Tecnologies). Lots of movies today feature businesses and governmental agencies with facial recognition software in place. Possibly, we may be able to install this software in our own homes. If a stranger rings our doorbell, the system could then immediately run the person’s face against all the mug shots in criminal and terrorist databases (Future Technologies).

Furthermore future home entertainment systems will be much more advance. By combining augmented reality and virtual reality, movies and television will be more interactive than ever before. In fact, you’ll just have to think about what you want to see and it will become reality in a second. Future homes will also take advantage of future robots to do chores such as cleaning and organizing.  It is already happening now, Japanese engineers have developed robots that recognize human speech and respond to it or do specific tasks in the house.

Right now devices are not yet communicating with each other, but they are so many connected items and so many devices that once we manage to make them interact with our homes there will be many more benefits, more power and flexibility so that you can make your future home as organized and relaxing as you want.

Sources:

Brad Stone, S. S. (2014, November 6). Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-06/amazon-echo-is-a-listening-talking-music-playing-speaker-for-your-home

McManus, M. R. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/future-tech/5-future-home-technologies6.htm

Orhan-Cileli, Y. T. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.futuretechnology500.com/index.php/future-homes/

 

 

 

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Forget about football, tennis or basketball, there is another form of sport booming…eSports. According to Twitch TV more than 100 million viewers watch video game play online each month, and that number keeps increasing (huffingtonpost). In the video game industry, streaming capacities have helped the rise of a new category of sporting events, professional video game competitions called eSports. It has become a million-dollar industry with millions of die-hard fans worldwide. But how big is this videogame thing really?

Let’s start with this: in October 2013, 32 million people watched the championship of Riot Games’ League of Legends on streaming services such as Twitch TV and YouTube and around 205 million people either watched or played eSports in 2014 (huffingtonpost). While eSports have long been biggest in Asia, especially gaming-frenzied South Korea, North America and Europe now claim 28 million eSports fans and they are growing by 21 percent a year (huffingtonpost). As an overall category, gaming has more YouTube followers than news, movies and education combined.

According to French sports newspaper L’Equipe, Paris Saint Germain is looking forward to invest in eSports. The French capital’s football club is in discussion with a French eSports team, Millenium, to build a partnership. Millenium has been one of the most important teams in France in the past ten years, and has participated in the most important games. It is also one of the most-visited news portals for videogames and eSports in France (Esportsobserver). This way PSG continues the trend of European soccer teams such as Schalke 04 in Germany and Besiktas in Turkey that are getting interested in eSports.

Have your parents also said that you were wasting your time playing videogames? Well, it might not have been true. In 2014 eSports event organizers have paid more than $35 million in prize money, not counting well-paid sponsorships with company such as Coca-Cola, Ford and American Express providing multimillion dollar sponsorships and organizational support to the world’s top players, many of whom earn seven-figure salaries and attract large and passionate online followers(Espn). In my opinion, eSports are well on their way not just to legitimacy in the industry, but to true sports supremacy. With hundredth of millions of hardcore gamers and thousands of global tournaments each year, video games are on their way to becoming the world’s biggest sports.

Sources:

Auxent, A. (2016, September 2). French Football Club PSG in Talks to Enter eSports. Retrieved from esportsobserver.com: http://esportsobserver.com/french-fotball-club-psg-in-talks-to-enter-esports/

Casselman, B. (2015, May 22). Retrieved from espn.com: http://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/13059210/esports-massive-industry-growing

Taylor, R. (2015, May 4). Rise of eSports is a Game Changer. Retrieved from huffingtonost.com: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rich-taylor/rise-of-esports-is-a-game_b_6784174.html