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.

Posted by  Dave Young at 11 January 2008 10:56

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