Jobs for Australians are always on the Government’s Agenda but jobs in regional areas are an even bigger issue.
For many country residents, the lack of easy access to local jobs means that they often leave their country home for the big smoke, where they believe that jobs are more plentiful and easier to find.
It’s a problem that a bright Sydney-based tech company and an equally bright Queensland-based job site provider put their heads together on late last year to come up with a solution to give regional residents job sites that help local employers and local jobseekers connect.
Workible recently announced that their partnership with WiC Group has seen the two companies roll out 45 regional job sites targeted at the major regional centres around Australia. Workible’s growth as a job tech provider has seen them expand significantly and their software now powers the largest connected network of job sites in Australia.
“That means that anyone, anywhere can post a job to any platform in the Workible network and it will appear on the sites that are most pertinent to it,” says Fiona Anson, Co-Founder and Director of Workible.
“We’ve seen national clients in Melbourne post a job for a Newcastle-based role that appears on JobsInTheHunter, the Retail Network, Charlestown Square’s Job Network and Hunter TAFE’s job site as well as WorkibleJobs our own jobs marketplace.” says Anson. “The connectedness of our platforms means that jobs go the places where the right people will see them.”
A network of networks
Workible’s award-winning technology now powers over 80 job sites including sites for communities, industry niches and TAFEs and the number is growing monthly.
Partnering with WiC Group for their 45 regional sites has given both companies leveraged expansion and a model that can be easily delivered to specific regions and communities anywhere. This adds to the town-specific sites already being rolled out by Workible and provides exposure for jobs over whole regions.
“WiC Group’s Founder, Tim O’Brien, and I met when we were launching the Newcastle jobs platform as his company already had a job site in the region. We sat down and had a chat and decided that, rather than compete, we should collaborate,” says Anson.
Each of the 45 sites are in varying stages of roll out and include sites like JobsInTheIllawarra.com.au to sites that are for remote areas like the Pilbara and the Riverina. The sites will cover all work types from casual and seasonal jobs to jobs for permanent full time workers and in all industry sectors.
“Regional Australia has certainly drawn the short straw when it comes to being looked after by job providers,” says O’Brien. “We’re aiming to remedy that with sites that specifically help locals connect with each other – especially when distance can be an issue.”
Workible’s mobile-first technology is one of the reasons that the solution is such a good fit. It allows instant communication between employers and jobseekers, even when they’re not in reach of a computer.
“Especially for people on the land, having access to everything via mobile devices is essential,” says Anson.
Workible also announced the launch of a rural specific job site – FarmJobs.com.au – which sits in the Workible network. It will list jobs from the regional networks that apply to farm work, as well as jobs that are specifically posted through the site.
How did Workible come to life?
“The idea for Workible came from our many car trips to visit mutual client. We wondered why, if a dating site could match love interests, why a job site couldn’t match availability,” said Alli and Fiona.
“Workible started life as a traditional job board called Hire Me Up. After complaining about how difficult it was to find work that fit around other obligations, we decided that to start a site that would allow employers and jobseekers to match availability.
“Twelve months into that business and we were fortunate to win our first ever pitching competition which sent us to the tech mecca, Silicon Valley. It was there that we got exposure to where tech businesses were heading and where we had the epiphany that, if we were to build a world class tech-based business, it had to incorporate three things – it had to be drive by mobile, it had to incorporate fast-growing video use and it had to have a social element.
“Eight painstaking months later, after researching the needs and pain points of both employers and jobseekers thoroughly, and the market itself – and after countless sheets of paper with screens, flow chats and designs, the first version of Workible was born.
“With the bare bones of a recruitment application, we pair tested it with 9 beta clients including as Dymocks and Optus – and immediately knew we had hit something.”
The super duo behind Workible
Fiona Anson is an award-winning businesswoman and inspirational speaker with a proven track in business. She has a wealth of experience as both a business owner and in the corporate arena. As a “serial entrepreneur”, she has owned her own businesses for over twenty years and worked with some of the biggest names in Australia.
Fiona has been the go-to business expert for the Daily Telegraph and Channel 9’s Small Business Show, has written for just about every major business magazine and newspaper in the country, has featured on numerous radio programmes as well as Qantas InFlight and has been an engaging and in-demand speaker for keynote presentations, workshops and seminars for industry, corporates such as American Express, Oracle and Apple, industry associations, training organisations, Government Departments, small business organisations and networking groups.
Alli Baker is an award-winning businesswoman too and a brilliant young entrepreneur with a proven track record including having been recognized as one of Australia’s Top 50 Female Entrepreneurs Under 40 for the last two consecutive years.
Her background in journalism, PR and marketing has seen her work with a variety of companies from multi-national to small business in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Upon moving to Australia in 2009, she used her journalism training and previous experience working as a media researcher to run her own media and marketing consulting business. It was in the early stages of starting her consulting business that she was struck by the flaws in the way people found work and workers, and decided to dive headfirst into the exciting world of technology to reinvent the way people connect around employment.
