The new
Fontanel Jobs

Fontanel started out as a platform for Willem and myself (Thomas) to experiment and challenge ourselves.

‍To have creative freedom and push our (and the industries) limits. Validating our vision, trying to find out what works and what doesn't.

We started this experiment 14 years ago. The online world was very different back then. Facebook was still a college invite-only platform and Instagram didn't even exist. The way you received inspiration was totally different. In the decade that followed we’ve seen so much change both in the digital and creative landscape. Looking back, we encountered an inflection point almost every other year. A moment where we needed to ask ourselves if what we we're doing was still relevant.

At the beginning of last summer, after having redesigned our magazine, this question once again popped up regarding Fontanel Jobs: is there still a need for a creative job board in The Netherlands? Or should we just pull the plug?

Because even though our job board had been running steady for quite some time, we felt it was starting to age. It had remained more or less unchanged in the last five years. Most of it had to do with Willem and I starting another company (Homerun) but also because we hadn't really taken the time to strategically analyse the value of a niche job board in these changing times.

So six months ago, we set out to try and find an answer to that question. We chatted to dozens of companies growing their creative teams. We interviewed creative job seekers, assessing their job hunt experiences and the problems they encountered.

Summarising, the two main problems that kept coming back were:

• Companies: struggle to connect with top talent. In a race for the best creative talent, they struggle to tell their story in order to differentiate themselves from similar companies.
• Job seekers: struggle to discover companies and jobs. The job hunt is usually a long and difficult journey, like finding a needle in a haystack. It starts with discovering and comparing companies and jobs that resonate and hopefully ends after a most often stressful application process.

After analysing all of the feedback we found both these problems weren't really solved by our current job board. Nor by other job boards for that matter.

So, we figured it was worth another shot. To try and make a case for a new version of Fontanel Jobs, combining our experience of running a creative job board with the experience of creating digital content for our online magazine.

We set out to create a new career platform for today’s creative professionals that:
‍
1.  are looking to discover new cool companies
2.  want to find a job they love
3.  are looking for guidance in their creative career growth

The new Fontanel Jobs

Today we’re proud to launch the first version of this new Fontanel Jobs. Besides a new design (new homepage, a new job post design and a new company profile design) we've rebuilt the website from the ground up and added quite a lot of new features, for both job seekers and companies including:

• Better company profiles
  ‍These help companies share a richer, more authentic story and enable job seekers to compare companies more easily.
• New city landing pages 
  ‍A dedicated landing page for Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag, Utrecht and Eindhoven. More to come if there's demand for it!
• New company type landing pages
  ‍A dedicated landing page for Agencies, Brands, Startups, Scale-ups and Corporates. If you know what you're looking for.
• Spotlights
  New ways for companies to be more visible on the platform with spotlight companies and spotlight jobs.

This is just the beginning though, there is more to come. In 2020 we will be creating more editorial content for creative career growth and also an improved dashboard for companies.