As an extension of the Ispo Job Market, a new online portal for the recruitment of new talent in the sporting goods sector launched last summer, Messe München is going to stage a new “Ispo Career Day” on Tuesday, Feb. 7, during the Ispo Munich trade show.
Between eight and ten firms will be able to hold five-minute meetings with candidates for internships or actual jobs in a customized 300-square-meter space in Hall B6, near the East Entrance. Six have already signed up for the plug-and-play service. They are Odlo, New Era, Patagonia, Poc, Skins and VF Corporation. The business schools of some universities are also involved in the new initiative.
About 320 companies are already registered in the Ispo Job Market, making it the biggest online portal of the kind in the sporting goods sector. Their job offers will be posted on digital Job Walls in several halls in the fair. Some 450 candidates for jobs in the sporting goods industry have already subscribed to participate in the Ispo Career Day or the Ispo Job Market, and they will be able to enter the fair free of charge. The organizers feel that their number will probably grow to between 600 and 700 by the time Ispo opens its doors.
The Ispo Career Day will be a new edition of a “speed dating” session organized at Ispo seven years ago by Andy Gugenheimer, a well-known recruitment specialist in the sector, through Sport Invest, an agency that he left a few years ago. The event was pretty successful, but the experience was not repeated because of lack of space.
Together with a former colleague at Sport Invest, Lennart Quecke, Gugenheimer is involved in the Ispo Career Day project as well as the Ispo Job Market through a different recruitment agency, AG Sport Consulting, and through Sportyjob, a five-year-old job portal in which close to 30,000 candidates are now registered, free of charge. It's a huge database that Ispo has been able to use for its new initiatives in the recruitment sector, based on its mission of establishing connections with the right people in the sporting goods industry.
In an important extension of the service, the Ispo Job Market will launch a mobile version of the platform at the beginning of February. Internationally renowned companies like Adidas, Intersport, Under Armour, The North Face and Quiksilver are already using the Ispo Job Market, which operates on the same principles as Sportyjob: If no suitable applications have been received in relation to an advertisement, it will be published for an extra month. If no suitable candidates have been found, the next advertisement will be free of charge.
Meanwhile, together with other partners, Gugenheimer is about to finalize a new round of funding for another interesting project, called My Money Time, which is changing its name to Xendera (Basque for “path”) at the end of this month. It gives selected sports brands the possibility to challenge sporty people in all kinds of sports performances through their mobile devices. If they achieve certain goals based on age, gender and previous training, they will get rewarded with vouchers for discounts on the brands' products.
More than 20 companies including Adidas, Arena, Asics, Dakine, Garmin, Oakley, Polar, Reebok, Roxy, Skins, Under Armour and W.L. Gore are participating in this new program, which has been adopted so far by more than 50,000 users in France, Germany and, since a few weeks ago, also in the U.K. and the U.S. Major networks of fitness enthusiasts like Apple Health, Endomondo, Run Keeper, Runtastic and Strava are also connected with the application, where more than 80,000 activities are being imported each week.
Gugenheimer and his partners will be holding meetings at Ispo to get more vendors as well as retailers involved in Xendera and its future developments. More about this in a future issue of SGI Europe.
