Happy 25th JobServe

Formed by Robbie Cowling and John Witney, JobServe, the world's first Internet Recruitment Service is about to celebrate its 25^th year of helping candidates to find job vacancies.

On May 4th 1994, JobServe launched as the world's first 'jobs-by-email' service. This was swiftly followed with JobServe's first web presence - the world's first recruitment website.

At the time of its launch the UK was emerging from the early nineties recession, and it was whilst working together as IT contractors that Robbie and John realised how difficult it was to find employment from recruitment magazines advertising out-of-date positions. Working in a freelance environment, where almost everybody was starting to use email, they quickly realised the potential benefit of receiving a daily email alert of jobs that were specific to the candidate’s job requirements.

To put it into perspective JobServe launched in 1995, just 1 year after the first web browser, in the same year as Yahoo, a year before eBay and Amazon and 10 years before Facebook.

Robbie bought John out in 1999 and despite numerous offers to sell JobServe he has remained in control of the business and is immensely proud of its part it the rise of the world wide web in the early 90s.

“Looking back at our achievement in the 90s I am amazed at what John and I were able to achieve so quickly. Although sometimes, with the head start we had, I get disappointed that JobServe isn’t bigger than Google. Then again most of the other internet successes of the 90s are no longer in existence so perhaps I am being hard on myself.”

“John and I have been in touch recently and we have a number of new ideas that we are going to discuss further in the very near future.”