Online recruitment has always fascinated me, even in the early days when the only real competition was newspaper advertising.

Why has it fascinated me? Now that’s a question I haven’t actually asked myself until now.

My first venture into online recruitment started as far back as 1995 when the Internet was more or less in its infancy. A national recruitment company had decided to post jobs on a web site in the hope that people would visit and apply for positions. It was a great idea but they hadn’t taken into consideration that you have to do something to attract people to the site and apply for jobs. Search engine optimisation wasn’t even heard off and the only way to get the message out to the handful of people who actually had Internet access was to advertise in the newspapers, the very people they were competing with! I followed the progress of this site for a couple of years and studied the rise of Internet usage before taking the plunge and launching a job website of my own.

In 1998, along with Gordon Adam and Paul Atkinson, two Directors of a recruitment agency called Direct Resources, the idea of RecruitmentScotland.com was conceived. At the time, the only online competitors were JobServe, Monster Board and OCC. The latter of the two are now Monster and CareerBuilder. I wanted to build a job website that focused on a geographical region and with employers desperate to recruit talent to handle the Y2K problem, it seemed logical to launch a web site that attracted people from around the World to come, live and work in Scotland. After all, talent was scarce and traditional advertising couldn’t find the right people. We were lucky enough to get the support for our idea from a number of leading Scottish employers such as Scottish Power, Standard Life, Scottish Widows, Cap Gemini, Bank of Scotland, The Royal bank of Scotland, Aegon and National Australia Group. In October of 1998, RecruitmentScotland.com was launch and the hard work was just about to begin.

At this time, it was easy to get a web site listed on the Internet. All that was required was the continual submission of the url to search engines like yahoo and lycos. There were many other search-listing providers but they fell by the wayside as the larger players took dominance and either bought their rivals or just let them go out of business. Within a few months we were taking the number one spot for all job searches in Scotland. There was nobody to touch us and very soon we were the dominant player in the Scottish market and also regarded as being one of the most prominent job web sites in the UK. This dominance continued until May 2000 when Monster.com acquired the business. Very quickly, RecruitmentScotland.com merged into the Monster brand and I decided to take a rest from the industry before deciding on the next development in online recruitment, the revolutionary idea of referring friends for financial rewards.

In my next post I will talk about my reasons for being involved in JobTonic.com and how the online job market has developed over the last seven years and why I find it so interesting. I will share my ideas on the good and bad of recruitment, how the industry has developed into a billion dollar industry and the introduction of social networking as a way to find a job.

As many of you may have noticed, we decided to change the design of our website to make it more appealing and easier to use for job seekers, referrers and recruiters.

This new design has been many months in development and with the help of feedback from site visitors, we believe that we have got it just right and with many more enhancements due in the next few weeks we hope to demonstrate that once again, JobTonic is at the leading edge of online recruitment.

To make it easier for people to navigate, we have colour coded each individual section for job seekers, referrers and recruiters and also provided a simpler and more effective ‘tab’ system of accessing the multitude of services that we offer. A new profiling and CV system offers job seekers a simple method of applying for advertised vacancies and also to promote themselves to potential employers.

We have also taken the advice of referrers and will soon be offering a more comprehensive set of tools to make the process of applying for and recommending jobs more productive.

What a pleasure it is to launch blogtonic with the announcement that www.jobtonic.com has been voted by some of the most senior industry figures the ‘best innovation in online recruitment’ in 2007. It has been just over one year since we set out to take online recruitment into the arena of social networking and reach passive candidates. In that time there has been no shortage of challenges for all the Jobtonic team. When clients started to advertise their jobs on our groundbreaking referral recruitment site in 2006 we were really entering uncharted territory. Well one year on our client list continues to grow and now ranges from one of the largest financial institutions in the world, to national media companies, to smaller specialist search & selection businesses. We now have 60,000+ people in our referral network and today have in excess of £570,000 available in referral rewards.

The Jobtonic product portfolio has grown in the last year to include a facebook app, publisher widget and white label solution. The innovation shown by the Jobtonic team continues to bear fruits with new product launches planned for the coming months. We will be writing more about these products here so check in regularly to see what we have planned for the now established referral recruitment market.

Cheers,
The Jobtonic Team.