The popular pond: are we all fishing in the same place?

Success has a strange habit. It attracts attention, attention attracts people, and people attract more people. Eventually, popular becomes the obvious choice — and then the only choice anybody considers.

Think of a restaurant with a queue outside. Everyone assumes the food must be exceptional. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is a queue.

Hiring has quietly gone the same way. The popular pond: are we all looking for talent in the same place?

The popular pond: are we all looking for talent in the same place?

Everybody fishing in one pond

Thousands of businesses publish vacancies on one platform. You know the one.

It became the norm — the default, the foundation — and its success made it the destination. It is still the destination, even though the way we work has changed considerably in the last few years.

That is not a criticism. It is human nature. Nobody questions the forest when it is the only place the hunter goes.

But it raises a question worth asking out loud: if everyone is fishing in the same pond, who is left to judge the quality of the fish?

Is everyone's listed education accurate? Is the platform structured in a way that quietly rewards embellishment? How would anybody know, when nothing in the shop window is ever checked?

What happened to our professional space The popular pond: are we all looking for talent in the same place?

Remember being slightly nervous about putting your CV online?

I was. It took me a while. You put your experience, your education, a proper photograph and your entire career history in one place — serious things. You did not simply throw your professional life onto the internet and hope. You read it back. You checked for mistakes. You made a colleague check it too.

That platform gave us somewhere for exactly that. You showed your career, companies showed their opportunities, and it worked. It became the first thing anybody asked about: "I couldn't find you on there. Why not?" — and it was genuinely awkward not to have an account.

Now?

Some days I open it and wonder which app I am in.

• A new role? There.

• A motivational quote before nine in the morning? There.

• A new baby? Somehow, also there.

• A birthday? There.

• Somebody leaving a company after six months? An emotional farewell post.

• Somebody starting a new job? "I am delighted, honoured, humbled, excited and thrilled to announce…" — you know the rest. We all do.

Somewhere along the way, the professional CV space turned into a bazaar. And then algorithms arrived to manage the bazaar: recruitment platform, networking platform, personal branding platform, content platform, messaging platform, social platform. All at once.

There is nothing wrong with a product evolving. Platforms grow, and growth means adding things. But it has become a little like a large online shop: you arrive looking for one item, and two hours later you have seen twenty others, read three opinions, watched a video and forgotten what you came for.

As my mother used to say — when one place becomes the place for everything, it is worth asking whether it can still be the best place for the one specific thing you need.

We are not asking you to leave

We are asking you to widen the search. Look past the noise, and try a different part of the forest for the rare bird.

What a specialised space looks like

On VirtualMasst you get your professional room back.

As an independent professional, companies see your professional space — what you offer and what you can do for them. Not the birthdays, not the emotional farewells, not whatever the feed decided to serve today.

And when a company finds you, the questions that usually come first have already been settled. Can you work on a freelance basis? Are you actually self-employed? The employee-or-freelancer distinction has been made before anybody reaches the conversation, because European professionals here are registered to operate independently.

The company arrived because it has a project and needs an expert. That is the whole context.

The big platforms can carry on being exactly what they are. We do not need to drain them.

We have simply built another lake.

The point of all this

The popular platforms are not the problem. They became popular for good reasons, and there is nothing wrong with continuing to use them.

The question is why they should be your only option.

The way we work has changed. Freelancing has changed. Companies have changed. Perhaps how we search for opportunities and for people should change too.

If you are hiring: diversification should not stop at your investments. Diversify where you look for talent. Try specialised platforms, different professional communities, places where the person you need may already be waiting.

If you are an independent professional: do not let your visibility depend entirely on one profile, one algorithm and one popular platform. Give your skills more than one place to be found.

That is where we come in. Not a replacement for what already works — another professional space to explore.

Sometimes finding something different starts with looking somewhere different.

So: where do you look for talent? Where do you look for work? Do the popular platforms still give you everything you need, or have you started looking elsewhere?

We would genuinely like to hear your side of it.

A quick note from us. The insights shared here are based on our team's honest opinions and experiences, presented in good faith to help you along the way. This isn't formal legal, financial, or tax advice, and we always recommend consulting a certified local professional to make sure you're fully compliant with your specific regional rules. We can't accept liability for any errors or omissions in these briefings.