Recruitment site so quick it had to slow down and reload

The take-off speed of some start-ups can be measured in customer or revenue numbers. For others, it can be measured by how quickly the company needs to revamp its business model.

FIFObids - a website where resource workers can advertise their skills to companies looking for staff - hit the ground running when it launched in April last year. It registered 30,000 unique visits on its first day of trading.

But the launch hit a snag when founders Mike Haywood and Antonluigi Gozzi realised their business model could not handle the customer numbers.

Within the first two weeks of opening for business, the pair was forced back to the drawing board. And within four weeks, Haywood, based in Perth, and Gozzi, based in Melbourne, had rewritten their business plan and were back.

Under their previous model, companies searched the FIFObids database and made bids or "connection requests" for suitable candidates.

Workers would review the bids and, if they accepted, FIFObids sent the worker's personal details including age, sex and hourly rate to the company making the job offer.

With FIFObids acting as middleman between the prospective worker and the company, the time between a job offer and a job being accepted or rejected was too long.

Haywood and Gozzi revisited the bidding model and decided to let workers accept or refuse job offers without FIFObids interfering.

"As soon as a company sends a connection request, the worker gets it via SMS or email and can click 'accept' or 'reject'," Haywood says.

"As soon as we did that, the amount of connection requests went up by 700 each month."

FIFObids has since been on the rise. Haywood says the site is now matching 500 workers to jobs each month. Some of those matches occur within minutes.

"The Friday after Anzac Day I saw a new company register at 8.08am and by 8.22am they had sent a connection request to an engineering technician," Haywood says. "By 8.26am that connection request was accepted. That's recruitment in 18 minutes."

Previously FIFObids made revenue by charging companies for each successful connection request. But two months ago a subscription model was introduced, with companies paying either $199 a month to contact 50 prospective workers or $499 a month for 100 workers. The company also makes revenue from selling up-to-the-minute market data reports. FIFObids is free for workers.

Haywood and Gozzi now want to expand across other industries.

They plan in June to launch livehire.me, an online marketplace for workers across all industries which will absorb FIFObids by the end of the year.