Vendor View: Kiwi invasion of the Australian recruitment market

Which country is the first to give women the right to vote? Which country carry out the most EFT-POS transactions, per capita, in the world? Which country sent the first man to the top of Everest? Still can’t figure out? Here’s an easy one – which national Cricket team is a perennial pretender? Our southern neighbour, New Zealand, of course.

Humour aside, the fact is our gutsy neighbour often punches above its weight in many fields. It looks like they are doing it in the recruitment/HR space as well. I recently ran into a couple of New Zealand companies with very unique stories to tell. Here’s a few of them:

ResourceWare, has been a player in the recruitment software market for almost a decade and half. Armed with a reputation for delivering robust systems, ResourceWare speciality is in customised solutions for recruitment firms and are pioneers in the case-management space. With over 100 clients in its kitty, Mike McDermott, Managing Director, is championing the strategic expansion into Asia and Europe.

Sonar6 aims to fix one of the biggest broken processes in HR – performance review. “We provide a helicopter view of performance review and succession planning” John Holt, CEO, told me in a recent meet up in Sydney. Sonar6 tackle a complex process which varies widely across most organisations by investing heavily on usability and simplicity. Sonar6 looks like a product worth reviewing as non other than Gartner selected them as a ‘cool vendor’. Sonar6 already have footprints in Asia and North America, and are giving more attention to Australia, lately.

One can thrive by focusing on a niche market and solve a single problem in the recruitment life cycle. I recently had a chin wag with the boys from GradConnection – Mike Casey, David Jenkins and Daniel Purchas (all Kiwi imports). GradConnection simply make the matching of new graduates to their choice of employers easy and useful. Their continuing growth is testimony to the variety and complexity of our industry, there is no one-size-fit-all solution. And a thousand niches exist.

TribeHQ is making waves globally. Part-job board, part-social networking site and part-micro blogging platform, TribeHQ is a product of our age. Harnessing the power of online networking and the affinity shared by people with a common profession, TribeHQ offers a refreshing take on recruitment advertising. Paul Jacobs, master of ceremonies at Recruitment 2.0 , along with Tim De Jardine, torchbearer at Hirewall (an online ATS), is the brains behind TribeHQ. Worth a visit.

Of course there are scores of job boards, recruitment and consulting firms with unique stories, but are beyond this article. It is good to see firms from our southern neighbour doing well in our backyard. I am on a mission to find out more products or companies with a Kiwi twang. Let me know if you come across any.

(P.S: Hubby of a good friend runs this online showroom; more Kiwi innovations for those interested. Disclosure: ResourceWare is a sponsor of the Job Board Report)