There's a new player on the growing employee recruitment industry scene.
Two Bermuda-based accountants have switched from crunching numbers to starting their own web business, Accountancy Jobs Abroad.com.
The site is two weeks old and co-owner Michael Williams, 34, is leaving his accounting job at International Advisory Services after six years to develop the venture back in his home town of Cardiff, Wales.
"I'm going home to do it full time," he said. "There's a skills shortage around the world for accountants - we get contacted by recruitment consultants on a daily basis."
He'll be joining his partner Adam Bendall, a native of Bristol, England, who also left his job of five years at IAS a month ago for the new venture.
Unlike some other recruitment agencies, the site has the advantage of being, as Mr. Williams puts it, an "officeless, paperless second-generation business" with few overheads.
"At other recruiting agencies, you've got to pay staff, you got to pay bills, so they're already behind the 8-ball... Our [commission] rates will be a lot lower than the industry average."
The site connects firms with accountants in some of the established offshore jurisdictions like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Guernsey and Ireland, to some of the developing markets like New Zealand and China.
Some of these places are so in need of accountants that they pay recruiting firms as much as 30 per cent in commission fees for each employee. Accountancy Jobs Abroad.com claims it will be considerably cheaper.
"This [job] will get us out of number crunching to become entrepreneurial," he said. "But with experience in financial disciplines, we've really learned to produce almost no costs."
And having no physical location means that the business can be more flexible, Mr. Williams said.
The website's name is no accident - it's designed to generate the maximum amount of hits for accountants looking for secondment positions overseas.
"First generation [sites] went for snappy domain names. We set up search engine optimization for this site," he said. "Being a second-generation website, we chose a name that would get a tremendous amount of hits [from job seekers].
"When you're in the one, two, or three spot on a Google search, really, that's the Holy Grail and that's what we're trying to do."
