Hippo Jobs

The Australian job market is serviced by a number of different job boards allowing the average person to search and sift through the plethora of jobs available. A byproduct of the first dot.com boom circa 2000, the industry has matured, with large scale web systems such as Seek, MyCareer and CareerOne being complemented by the more specialist websites focused on industry verticals and niche markets. The one area which has consistently been overlooked and received poor representation in this growth period is the part time job market, that caters to an audience looking for part time or casual work. By their very nature, part time jobs were not an attractive proposition to large scale recruitment agencies, because the salaries were of a lower threshold to make resourcing for such positions viable. Conversely with this new found maturity in the web, businesses suited to hiring large scale volumes of part time and casual employees are searching for new and novel ways to secure potential employees. With the emergence of 3G mobile phone technology and the take up of broadband enabling faster communications, the possibility of entirely searching, selecting and communicating with a prospective employer online is a reality which is fast altering the landscape of recruitment.

Hippo Jobs approached Areeba in December of 2004 with the original idea of developing a large scale web system which would service this burgeoning market. Areeba spent time with the Hippo principals advising on existing business models which were working and the short falls which were in place for both employees and prospective advertisers. One of the areas identified from the candidate’s side was that much of the target audience did not have access to a car, as much of the time, they were still in school or at university. Addressing this need, Areeba advised on deploying postcode searching which would show the jobs most relevant closest to the candidate's address.

Additionally, brand awareness was an extremely neglected area on the vast majority of job boards assessed by the Areeba team, with minimal representation of the businesses which were recruiting for prospective staff. Areeba devised with the client some base ground rules for targeting the market audience and ensuring the clear representation of the listing business' brand.

Technically, the application is a highly extensible .NET 2.0 environment supported by Microsoft SQL 2005. Areeba also offered technical advice and negotiation expertise in the hardware environment, opting for a set of clustered enterprise grade servers running on Microsoft Windows 64 Bit architecture. The architecture of this application has been built and optimised to make use of a multi-processor load balanced server environment, to ensure reliability and robustness. Interactivity and functional components such as navigation, job search and job shortlisting are delivered by a variety of AJAX controls aimed at enhancing the user experience. The site has been entirely built with an ultimate focus on ease of use and clear representation of information.

September 2007, saw Hippo Jobs Awarded the Entrepreneur & SME focused Smart Company (http://www.smartcompany.com.au/) website of the year award.