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Linked In is great if the skills you have easily show on paper, but what of the creatives? Title and job description don’t begin to scratch the surface of the rich visual art, video, web and industrial design that many creative employees offer and so it’s hard to showcase their real skill in the black and white world of Linked In. So it’s time to forget the links and get with The Loop. Last week Australian multimedia professional networking site The Loop launched into beta, offering a new platform to discover not only creative employees but the type of businesses that hire them. The site was created by Pip Jamieson and Matt Fayle, who worked together at MTV, she in marketing he in digital media According to Matt. After years working in online creative, Matt looked at the rich abilities Facebook offered to share photos and videos, but noted that Facebook is more a place for fun than work. He dreamed of creating a site where those in the creative industry could let their work speak for them. The Loop does is this by easily allowing video, photos and sound bites to be uploaded (or tracked in via Vimeo or Yotube) into individual portfolios, showcasing all their work on a single project or with a single employer. At its core, The Loop is designed to match professionals with job opportunities. Standard, Premium and Display ads are offered, and The Loop is introducing a price-capped Cost Per Application model – a new alternative in the online job advertising market - making recruitment costs measurable, accountable and affordable to smaller, boutique scale businesses.

Matt and Pip employed Visiontech Digital to help bring the idea to life after meeting with several other design companies with wide ranging price quotes. In the end they settled on Visiontech because of the company’s experience with real estate sites and Matt recognized that the same values that applied to a house listing (information, pictures, video) also applied to a person and the translation from one to another would be easier for Visiontech than others.

Although it has just entered Beta the site is already well stocked with members as The Loop has reached out to universities and professional organizations including AFI, AFTRS, AIMIA, AWARD, COFA, Billy Blue College of Design, Design Victoria, Metro Screen, Screen NSW. As for the site’s next plans, Matt says the site has no immediate goals to go global but that if it did it would stay with a hyper local aspect and that the local community (as implicated by the .au) is an important part of their vision for the site. Other features they are looking at introducing include groups and the ability to use referrals.

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