Although just months old, cyber business Jobber.bm has entered a new stage of maturity, and is now being used as a tool for small businesses to find employees.

From its start as a website seeking bids for casual, short-term tasks such as event staffing and cleaning, founder Stafford Lowe pointed to a new use of the website by job posters who are looking for employment seekers to bid for permanent positions in their companies.

“It started happening within a couple of months of its launch,” he said.

With more than 1,000 job seekers registered, its original purpose — work offers get posted, and ‘jobbers’ make a single bid stating the reasons they should be chosen, with instant e-mail alerts keeping parties informed — is vibrant.

“But we want to grow the number of jobs as quickly as possible,” Mr Lowe added. “We have more than 1,000 people who have signed up for jobs, and about 150 job posters — we want to even the balance out.

“So this is a win-win situation for businesses, and it’s an opportunity for them to support us.” He pointed to the popular lunchtime restaurant Nonna’s on Bermudiana Road as an example of one user.

“Working with companies has been great and we want to do more of it,” he said.

Mr Lowe pointed to other initiatives. “We have piloted the concept of ‘delivery on demand’ with Just Shirts, Mailboxes Unlimited and Gorham’s, where customers are able to choose their own quick responding jobbers for either same day or scheduled deliveries.

“We have (also) launched a jobber ratings system for job posters to rate jobbers online after a specific job has been completed.

“Gorham’s and Just Shirts want to help us stimulate the number of jobs getting posted by offering special coupons which are only available to posters and jobbers connected by the website.

“The concept we’ve launched with Gorham’s and Just Shirts is that posters and jobbers who are successfully brought together by the website get e-mailed a free coupon that they can print out, and have ten days to use.

“We developed the coupon idea because we had started seeing local businesses advertising positions on Jobber.bm and we were wanted to engage with them more. We would love to see more businesses using the website as a way to find temporary help and if those temporary engagements turn into full-time jobs somewhere down the line, then so much the better.

“We also wanted to try to find creative, new ways to entice people to try posting their own personal jobs, because we’re quite confident that once someone has tried using the website, they will come back and post more little jobs. My wife and I use the website a lot ourselves and seeing people’s bids come gets quite addictive!” he said.

“We hope to be able to partner with different businesses every month or so to launch new special offers. On their own, these coupons are just a nice little perk, but the concept represents what we’re trying to do in terms of pulling the community together and creating different ways to provide mutual support.”

Mr Lowe has just launched a ratings system on the website. “This is the transparency feature. It’s about being able to look through reviews and see if you want to pay one guy $100 for a job because three people say he’s good, or another guy $50 because he hasn’t got a rating yet. It rewards good performance and deters bad performances,” he said. “So the idea is that we are trying to create accountability, which is the reason we have reviews and ratings.

“What we think is great is that it allows people who have fallen out of the mainstream job market to get together their virtual references and show them to a perspective employer. So we can get people [full-time] jobs.

“This is not instead of a mainstream job market — this is an untapped market, and Jobber is the communications device for this market.”

Mr Lowe said: “My biggest fear is that five or ten people get the concept very quickly and win more than their fair share of jobs!

“We feel there is a responsibility to help people to learn to use the website successfully. I am tutoring people as much as I can at this stage!

“We think this could be a really good way to teach people how to get jobs, ultimately.

“A small number of people become ‘power jobbers’ but for others, this is a way to help them apply for a full-time job, especially as we have started to see actual companies post full-time jobs.”

The website has the potential to be used for other purposes as well — Mr Lowe foresees the day when it will be used as place to actually set up new businesses.