Winning the most innovative supplier award at the AAGE Conference was one of the proudest moments in our company's short history to date and is an amazing contrast to our first conference.
Our first AAGE conference was in 2008 in Melbourne. It was our first ever taste of this amazing industry we work in. At the time we had no real product and had a very small budget. Dan and I drove down to Melbourne to save money, and nearly ran out of petrol on the way back. We gave away an Oxfam goat on our stand and Dave didn't even make it down because he was busy completing an IT contract up in Darwin just to keep GradConnection afloat.
At the end of the 2008 conference we collected 70 or so business cards. We called everyone and then spent the following weeks travelling around Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne visiting many employers and showing them what our new website for graduates was going to be like. On the 24th of December 2008 the Australian Treasury signed off as our first employer. We had the most amazing Christmas and new year ever and went into the new year with our heads held high and managed to get a further thirteen employers on board for the launch of our website on 1 March 2009.
Valuable lessons
We have learnt a very valuable lesson in this industry, and that is that you need to continue to innovate. We are dealing with Australia's youngest and brightest, and they are the ones that continually change the recruitment marketing game. We came into this industry as the first specialist online marketing product for campus recruitment and four and a half years later, we are currently going through the fourth complete rewrite of our site. We need to keep up with technology and our users to stay in the game.
We would love to continue to be in the running for the most innovative supplier award over the years to come so please suggest any new ways you think we could innovate in this space – we'd love to hear from you.
Thanks to everyone who voted for us, we really appreciate your support. Make sure you claim a coffee on us next time we pop in to say hello!
Mike