The beginning

JobServe were the worlds first Internet Recruitment Service.

The company was formed late in 1993 by myself, Robbie Cowling, an IT contractor with no previous experience of running a business and John Witney, another IT contractor who also had no previous experience of running a business.

So what gave us the idea of setting up JobServe in the first place? Well, at this time the IT recruitment market was just coming out of recession and John and myself, whilst both contracting at the same company, were discussing how difficult it was to locate jobs by reading out of date job adverts in recruitment magazines. We were working on a contract where every one used email and thought how good it would be to receive a daily email of the latest jobs that matched a given criteria. No one was offering the service, the Internet was just starting to take off and we knew how desperately the service was needed.

That was all the encouragement we needed, it was now our duty to launch the service. We had to save all of the IT contractors in the UK from their current plight. Not only that we wanted to make a few quid.

On May 4th 1994 we launched the worlds first ‘Jobs by Email’ service delivering a handful of jobs to just over a dozen email addresses. This was followed later in the year by the world’s first recruitment web site.

Actually from that day on we knew our life would never be the same again and it hasn’t been. The idea took off immediately and we suddenly both had 2 full-time jobs on our hands. By July I was able to stop contracting to concentrate full-time on running the business and by the end of the same year John became our second full-time member of staff and launched our web site.

From day one JobServe has made a profit. In fact in 2000, when the rest of the world was losing money on the web we were the UK’s fasted growing company in terms of profit and even during recent times when recruitment has been in recession we have maintained profit margins of around 50%. Not bad for a couple of guys who didn’t know how to run a business.

Now

JobServe currently operate in 17 industry sectors and advertises jobs from all over the world. Much of our success is down to the 80 plus staff we now employ who work from our purpose built headquarters in Tiptree, Essex as well as offices in Colchester also in Essex, Hixon in Staffordshire, Swindon in Wiltshire and our Australian headquarters in Sydney, Australia.

In 1993 we planted a seed for success when we created something that was not only new, but at that time was significantly better than anything else of its kind. 12 years later we are still ahead of the many other companies that have now filled the industry we created and we are constantly seeking ways to keep ahead.

We currently advertise over 2.5 million jobs a year and this is growing FAST.

‘Jobs by Email’ is now sent immediately where requested as well as overnight if preferred. We currently deliver over 800,000 emails a day.

Our web site receives over 10'000'000 hits a month from over 70'000 unique visitors.

Candidates can also receive job details by SMS, RSS and we even have a phone number they can call that connects to our computers who will use text to voice technology to read out the details of a specified vacancy.

The Future

After 11 years I know a little bit more about how to run a successful business but I am of course still learning all of the time. The most important lesson I have learned so far is that when a business does something really well and by that I mean better than anyone else, then success and the rewards that go with that success will follow.

JobServe’s mission statement is “To be the best and for it to be common knowledge that we are the best”. This is something that every member of JobServe strives for every day. In many areas JobServe is already achieving its aim but until every part of JobServe is better than any part of our competitors services we must improve it to make it so.

Once we have achieved that then I guess we'll need to improve it some more to keep it ahead of what is an extremely fast moving and dynamic business sector.