Winner, Best Business Startup of the Year

The reason for my nomination

MyWorkSearch Ltd was founded in February 2009. In 10 months we have developed and launched a ‘Software as a Service’ application, grown to over £100k per month revenues and become highly profitable. We spotted that job seekers were struggling to secure work in what had become an extremely hostile employment market. They needed help however the costs and resources required meant that conventional person-delivered outplacement was impractical. We recognised that outplacement comprised a number of services that could be delivered online using technology. This would make the service scalable whilst also being affordable.

The initial business plan was modest. We would create a simple software platform to deliver our content and sell subscriptions. Our customers would be both job seekers and employers making staff redundant. We would sell online and through channel partners. The company would be profitable on limited revenues and this would be an interesting new business to be involved in at a time when the world was contemplating a catastrophic economic depression.

We quickly recognised that we had set our sights too low and that far more was possible. We decided to enhance the specification of our platform and truly re-engineer the outplacement process. Our product would now have the following capabilities:

• Content delivery to provide job seekers with comprehensive multi-media e-learning;

• Tools to manage many of the time-consuming job-search tasks, such as CV building, vacancy aggregation, monitoring of employer jobs pages, email management, etc;

• Workflow automation to track a person’s job-seeking activities and remind the individual when activities fall due;

• Triggers that monitor all that a job seeker does and based upon this deliver personalised advice, tasks and content;

• Group membership so individuals can be assigned to a category and according to this receive different content and workflow;

• Comprehensive job search activity reporting for the individual, the individual’s spouse and, where relevant, interested parties such as Jobcentre Plus.

In August 2009 we launched www.MyWorksearch.co.uk aimed at the individual job seeker and www.mynewjob.me aimed at the employer. We agreed affiliate relationships with several of the largest UK job boards and a reseller agreement with a substantial psychometric test publisher.

The market reaction has been superb. In addition to our initial customer segments we have become a major supplier to the UK government. Every Jobcentre Plus office in the country can now refer and pay for job seekers to enrol in MyWorkSearch.

Unemployment will be high for at least the next 18 months and this will ensure significant revenues. We are using this income and, very importantly, this experience to continue investing in our product and ensure it becomes better and better. Even in buoyant economic times there are job market upheavals and the UK outplacement market is worth approximately £75m per year. We are certain that our technology approach to outplacement is the only viable long-term model and post-recession we will be the best-known technology enabled product, delivering a superb solution whilst achieving the high margins possible with SAAS businesses.