Rise of one-stop recruitment shops aided by shift online In 2006, when Edwin van Rest stepped off the plane at Schiphol (Amsterdam) after studying in Osaka, Japan, for two years he expected that his new masters in industrial engineering would be the ticket to his career. Within a year, however, driven by his friends’ reactions – typified by, “Wow, I wish I had known about those opportunities to study abroad”– to his stories of being immersed in a different culture, he and two friends founded Mastersportal. Two years later, they folded this on-line one-stop-information and application platform into the umbrella organisation Studyportals, which includes Bachelors Portal and PhD Portal.