GAAPweb.com celebrates its 10th birthday this year and in that time we have achieved some great things for decidedly humble beginnings.
The past
GAAPweb was originally formed by Cliff Olson and Mark Wainwright in 1998, and we asked Mark how they got started:
“As Australians living and working in the UK as contractors, Cliff and I had both experienced seeking work (in computing and finance respectively) through recruitment agencies, and we recognised the strengths and weaknesses in that process from a candidate’s viewpoint.
IT and generalist job boards had begun to appear in the UK in 1995-96 and we had both found work in this way. The “light bulb moment” occurred during a conversation about an upcoming trip to Australia in September 1997, which would be followed by once-again-trawling-around-the-agencies for a new contract. It became immediately apparent that there was a gap in the market. There was an obvious need for an online job board specifically for accountants and other financial professionals. We began work straight away, and after nine months the GAAPweb site went “live” on the 1st of June 1998.
At first, many of our clients did not have websites, but more incredibly some did not even have an email address! We gave a lot of advice on the benefits of the Internet and how to go about “getting connected” in those early days. Our recruitment consultancy clients quickly saw the benefits of the Internet as a communication and marketing tool, and the sense in using job sites, in particular specialists like GAAPweb, in reaching out to candidates. Jobseekers adopted the Internet as a job search tool very quickly, and we found ourselves serving a very fast growing and active audience.
After firstly operating out of Cliff’s house in South Clapham, we moved to a small office at Plantation Wharf in Battersea with ourselves and two staff. After less than two years we were at capacity with a team of ten, and moved to a much bigger office in the same development. We had taken on a General Manager before this move to take over the day to day running of our rapidly growing business, thank goodness! He did a sterling job in dealing with a threefold increase in staff, clients and revenue over the ensuing two and a half years before we passed our baby on to Trinity Mirror in August 2005.”
You can see what the site looked like in December 1998, by clicking here.
The present
In 1998, we published just 400 vacancies in a whole year. Now in 2008, we publish over 22,000 each month, that’s over 1,000 each working day. Its no wonder we have to have a dedicated team of Online Content Editor’s to place all these jobs on the site!
Some of our candidates have been using us for the whole 10 years too - 21 candidates to be precise who are still using us to find their next dream job on GAAPweb.
So what else has changed? Well our humble beginnings were as a jobsite, but GAAPweb are so much more ten years on. We have:
-
A CV database with over 16,000 active jobseekers
-
A monthly face to face interaction with our candidates in London
-
Regular and informative e mails to our candidates
-
A Facebook page with over 460 candidates who receive daily news and blog feeds into their home page
-
A free CV review service, hosted by The Fuller CV, to ensure candidates CV’s are the best they can be
-
A strong recognisable brand and creative that’s recognised by both clients and candidates in the market place
The future
We are aiming to continue the success of the past 10 years for the next 10 years and if the past year is anything to go by, the future is looking very bright.
While we continue to have the best jobs for those accountants who are already qualified and working, we are continuing our work with and those who are just starting out in finance and accountancy, to get their career off to a flying start. We are talking to some of the best Graduate recruiters to be able to offer our Graduate and new starter candidates the ‘perfect match’ for their new career.
We are looking to roll out our successful regionally in the UK, and you never know maybe internationally. There are candidates in areas from Durham to Dubai who want to interact more with GAAPweb and we aim to meet each and every one of them. We are also developing an online version of this through Linked In, which we hope to launch later on in the year.
As you probably know GAAPweb aren’t just a jobsite, we like to think of ourselves as a resource centre for candidates too. Following on from this line of thought, we are launching a CPD facility later on this year which will allow candidates who are not only looking for a job but also to maintain their CPD requirement, to find the perfect training course or event for their needs, here on GAAPweb.
I won’t spoil the fun but watch this space for many other additions to the site, all designed and developed to be a ‘perfect match’ for today’s job seeker.
