In the beginning....

We've successfully navigated the last 9 months of development and I thought it would be good to do a 'Story so far' piece:

Background

I started my own internationally focussed recruitment agency in 2006 after working for a medium sized Scottish agency and before that, a large London based agency. We achieved significant growth in the first few years in what was largely a candidate driven market until the global crash in financial markets in 2008/9 which forced us to rethink many standard working practices and drive for greater efficiencies in the business.    

From Concept to Action - September 2009:

While searching clients websites for jobs to match a new candidate's profile, a thought crossed my mind:

"Why can't we search all of our clients live jobs from one place? It's just data floating around on the internet so if it's out there it must be possible to aggregate it and save a load of time, boost productivity and increase my revenue."

We spent a few days searching the internet for a solution we realised that the software providers to the recruitment industry are generally IT guys rather than Recruitment Consultants and focussed on RPO or candidate database systems. The market has changed but the providers haven't. After another cup of coffee I decided to make it happen and throw some investment behind it to get it off the drawing board.

From Design to Starting Commercial Trials - February 2010:

Over the winter we hired a team of developers, laid out the designs, found out what was achievable and challenged them to go further. The project grew and was finally christened MarketMate. It fulfilled the role of a traditional 'resourcer' and keeps track of the jobs market... as well as much more.

As we progressed through the development cycle we discovered that the data we were collecting was capable of delivering far more than the sum of its parts. New functionality could be added and new market-wide insights could be gained from analysing the amazing data that was being produced. Let's just say that the MarketMate project grew in potential and we knew that we should go to market with it rather than sit on it in-house. 

The first step towards commercially launching was to approach a well regarded agency with the opportunity to trial the software and we were over the moon when we secured our trial partner. The trials were set to begin in February so we worked hard to pull the user interface up to standard, aiming for as high a quality as possible before sending it out into the wild. We'd now crossed the first major hurdle of industry acceptance and hoped to gain valuable insights and feedback from the trial process.


Further Development before commercial launch - Feb - July 2010 (the present)

Last week (May 10th) we had an update meeting with the trial partner and had an excellent session. Many of our ideas are now being integrated into the newest version of MarketMate RS and the user interface is really taking shape. The additional functionality looks great and, with the help of the feedback, we have re-focussed on developing the core further.

We are ambitiously looking at going to market during July 2010 (if all runs smoothly) just in time for the soccer world cup finals... lets hope it's not too hard to get meetings arranged!

A big thanks to the team for their work so far and watch this space for more updates to come!