Internet sites and business issues relevant to Canadian processors and moldmakers (January 01, 2001)
By Cindy Macdonald
Open for businessAs plastics dot-coms morph and some shrivel and die, two more have recently completed development and officially launched. The Plastics Exchange (1) is now open for business with live...
Open for business
As plastics dot-coms morph and some shrivel and die, two more have recently completed development and officially launched. The Plastics Exchange (1) is now open for business with live prices for 28 grades of prime commodity plastics in truckload and railcar quantities. The site provides integrated credit and logistics and guarantees product quality and delivery. In addition to the trading floor, there’s resin market analysis and daily industry news.
Omnexus (2), the heavyweight consortium of mostly resin companies, has also conducted its first transaction.
Buyplastics.com (3) has changed its name to better reflect its focus on product development and supply chain collaboration. The new name is Conferos.
(1) www.theplasticsexchange.com
(2) www.omnexus.com
(3) www.conferos.com
The place to go for skilled staff
PlasticsJobsForum.com (4) is a recruiting site serving both Canada and the U.S. It is the creation of Jim Karlin, a plastics design consultant and also a principal and founder of the Search Team, an executive search group. The site is simple and straightforward, with ways to ensure confidentiality should you want to post a resume or position available. Karlin says there are a fair number of Canadian resumes listed, and some Canadian employers registered to browse the resumes. There is no charge to job seekers for posting resumes. Employers are charged for a job posting and for the privilege of searching resumes. Karlin estimates the site generally has between 50 and 100 employers with paid memberships permitting them to view resumes.
For interest’s sake, I checked out several other recruitment sites. Headhunter (5), mentioned as one of the largest by Karlin, had over 1,000,000 resumes. The downside is it costs US$1500 for three months of access to view resumes (small business rate), and the categories are too broad for an efficient search. I did a trial search of the only four categories that seemed relevant (manufacturing, technical, trades and engineering) with Canada as the specified country, and received an error message that the search had turned up over 1000 resumes. Too broad to be helpful I think. The same problems apply to Monster.com (6) I suspect, but it doesn’t give a trial search to verify that assumption.
There is another plastics-related site, plastics-careers.com (7), but it appears to be run by a recruitment firm, and offers services only for job seekers.
(6) www.monster.com
Plast-Ex at your fingertips
Plast-Ex has joined the ranks of world class shows with a user-friendly, searchable web site (8). The site has features for visitors (search for exhibitors or products, seminar schedules, online registration, product previews and hotel/travel info) as well as password-protected tools for exhibitors. Plast-Ex takes place April 30 to May 3, 2001 in Toronto.
