Recruitment Industry

Job agencies were constantly chasing people for up to date CVs, asking when they were available for work, and if they didn't mind working long distances away. If all else failed, agencies simply asked if they knew anyone else with similar skills who might be available.

Internet job boards had become the norm in the mid to late nineties. Clearly job boards had some advantages then , but in a lot of ways the job board model is outdated, restrictive and expensive. Today we still see multiple adverts for the same job, non-existent jobs advertised to phish for peoples CVs and perhaps most peculiar of all, the majority of job boards ask prospective candidates to send their CV to them for free and subsequently sell the CV on to a limited set of employers for hundreds of dollars.

Many smaller firms simply couldn't afford to advertise job vacancies in this way (or pay for peoples CVs) and so a great deal of jobs were "discovered" by word of mouth. Today, people are changing jobs much more frequently than before and the whole recruitment business has become more fluid. What if there was a way to open up the recruitment business and make it easier for people to advertise their skills to a much wider audience than has been possible before? What if people could have more control over what they say about themselves; their CV, their availability, their references.