This is the first article by Floriano Bonfigli, founder of We Innov8. Expect to see quite a few more by him over here.

You may have already heard about this: start-up companies have been a major contributor to U.S. job creation. In fact, the Kauffman Foundation released a report in January 2009 showing that over the 1980-2005 period, companies with 1 to 4 employees accounted for a large percentage of new jobs in any given year, about 20% on average. Moreover, if the jobs coming from new firms were excluded, the U.S. net employment growth rate would have been negative on average.

Last July, the Kauffman Foundation released a new report. They looked at employment in new companies as they age, by tracking cohorts of firms started from 1977 till 2000. There are some good news coming out the document. The first is that for a given cohort of start-ups reaching the five years mark, the employment level is 80% of what it was when they were launched. It does seem that jobs created by start-ups do not tend to disappear that fast, despite being highly volatile. As several studies show, fewer than half of all new startup survive to their fifth year, and this rate is already a huge improvement over the previous years. However, the jobs lost at failing or reorganizing ventures are partially balanced out by the ones created at growing firms.

Given the recent crisis, the Kauffman Foundation has also investigated how recessions affect total employment in start-ups. The second good news is that new ventures do not appear to be affected in the long term if they start in a recession. They indeed hire fewer people in the first years, but they are likely to catch back up to firms not launched in a recession cycle, as they reach the five years mark. On the contrary, prolonged or serial recessions do seem to affect total employment. In particular, ventures that go through periods of three recession years showed about 10% less employment, with reference to their start-up years, than ventures facing no recession in their first 5 years (obviously). Thus, companies starting now are less likely to be hurt than the ones started at the beginning of the current recession. As long as the U.S. economy keeps growing and eventually ramps up out of recession!

This is just a short review of the report. If you want to go dig deeper and take a look at the charts, you can download the .pdf document right here.

Every major job portal out there is focused on the big companies and aspiring entrepreneurs are left alone in the difficult job search. While everyone agrees that to gain experience as an entrepreneur the only way is to actually start your company or work in a startup and try to grab the most out of the experience, no one helps students in this difficult search.

Now recent graduates have a easy way of finding internships in startups and small businesses: Enternships.
The site was started by Rajeeb Dey, a 23 years old graduate from the University of Oxford. Being president of The Oxford Entrepreneurs student society Dey is very informed about students’ needs and is also very connected with the UK startup scene.

“If you want to be a lawyer, accountant or banker you can do internships in the summer of your penultimate year but if you want to be an entrepreneur, other than setting up your own venture the best way to learn is to work in a start-up / small firm. In the current economic climate in particular there are fewer jobs available in big corporations so it’s about time we shifted our attention to the ‘long tail’ of the recruitment industry and looked at the millions of small but exciting firms out there.” Dey said.

The premise of the new site is very simple, employers sign up and post placements and potential enterns upload their CVs and apply for them. Employers are then able to manage the entire recruitment process, from posting a vacancy to filtering, interviewing and selecting candidates, via the website.

There are already plenty of listings from a lot of the major european startups such as Huddle, MyDeco and Wakoopa. The team is now working on expanding their radius to India and USA.

“One of the greatest luxuries of being a student is having the time to think about ideas. One of the best things about being in a start-up is that it is all about ideas. An Enternship will give you a great opportunity experience life in an entrepreneurial environment.” Says Martha Lane Fox, Co-Founder of Lastminute.com and CEO of Lucky Voice, who is supporting Enternships and providing great positions in some of their ventures.

If you are a student looking for some entrepreneurial experience, this will surely be helpful.

Facebook is considered to be one of the best places to work in the world, and that doesn’t come as a surprise: who wouldn’t want to work for a company that changes the way we live? Facebook has more than 200 million registered users, and you would work on a product that many (all) of your friends use daily.

If you must know, Facebook has many European offices and is hiring for different positions all around our lovely continent.

If you are based in London, Dublin, Paris, Stockholm or Milan there are open positions waiting for your application. You should definitely check out facebook’s careers page.

Here you can find a nice promo video: