Job advertising has powered Seek Limited's (ASX: SEK) shares from listing in 2005 at $2.40 to a high of $18.54 in March this year.
The company virtually revolutionised the way ordinary people look for new employment opportunities, and totally destroyed the hold traditional Saturday newspapers had on the industry. It was also one of the moves that strangled Fairfax Media Limited's (ASX: FXJ) and News Corp's (ASX: NWS) highly profitable (at the time) Australian newspapers.
Now another company wants to revolutionise the way employers hire staff, and it listed on the ASX just last week.
The company is called 1-Page Ltd (ASX: 1PG), and is the first Silicon Valley company to list on the ASX. What 1-Page does that is unique is provides companies the ability to rank and select job candidates by asking them to take an online test to solve real world challenges in the new role they are applying for.
US-listed Pandora Media, of Pandora Internet radio fame is one of 1-Page's high profile tech clients, along with Splunk and Coupons.com.
With 3 billion people of working age populating this planet, IBISWorld estimates the global workforce was worth an estimated $598 billion in 2013.
An estimated 54 million people are hired each year in the US alone (although that is offset by a number leaving, retiring, and includes those changing roles). That suggests the market for 1-Page is large, even if it can capture a small percentage of that.
As the company notes, sending resumes to apply for a job is currently an unwieldy process inviting innovation. 1-Page says 75% of all resumes are from those people who are unqualified for the role – 6.8 billion resumes were sent for 5 million jobs in the US in 2013.
1-Page's technology means the average hiring process is dramatically reduced from 13 weeks to 4 weeks, improves retention by ~75% because companies hire the right people in the first place, and cuts the hiring costs to a fraction of what they were previously.
The challenge for 1-Page now is to add more and more clients, with the aim being to totally disrupt existing hiring methods, and entrench itself as the default way of finding the right candidates. That's not an easy task, but if it's successful, 1-Page could be worth multiples of its current value.
If it doesn't get taken over by the likes of Seek, 1-Page could be one stock to add to your watchlist.
