IF YOU have applied for a job online in the last 15 years, chances are you used a Madgex job board.

Almost every newspaper and B2B publisher in the UK uses the Brighton company’s white label solution for online recruitment.

This means the job boards they create for 500-plus brands are designed to look and feel like a seamless part of the company’s own website – even if the footnote and shows they are powered by Madgex software.

Beneath the branded veneer is millions of pounds of R&D and 15 years' experience.

Yet the company never set out to be the UK’s go-to job board.

Director Dan Meadows said: “We are really proud of the fact we are working for leading media brands, and they see us as experts in our field.

“In the early days our only idea was that there was an opportunity to win lots of work developing software which we thought would be fun.

“We had no real idea of what the business was going to do.”

Madgex won its first contract with Reed Business Information, with the name coming from the first letter of its five founders’ names - Mark Bedser, Andy Taylor, Dan Meadows, Glenn Jones and Eric Kaps - and added an X at the end.

They initially worked out of a house in Brighton, with someone working on the kitchen counter, another at the living room table and a couple more upstairs in the bedroom.

Despite the unconventional start, the new company was a resounding success and within a couple of years, Madgex became a key supplier of RBI's online services - but in order to grow they needed to specialise.

Dan said: “We needed to find a niche. Most of the magazines we worked for made from money from advertising, particularly recruitment adverts.

“All that was migrating onto the web, so we saw an opportunity and decided to focus in on that.”

The company is now the leading provider of job board software in Europe, if not the world.

Clients include the Guardian, Times, Washington Post, Haymarket, EMAP and TMDR. Their users carry out over 40 million job searches and 2.2 million job applications every month.

Chief executive Tom Ricca-McCarthy explained: “Job boards are incredibly niche, but as a business strategy it’s proven to be a good thing.

“We decided to focus purely on that and be the best at it.”

With Madgex dominating the UK market, Tom was originally brought in as sales director.

He has since helped Madgex expand around the world, with an office in Toronto and another European office to open in 2016.

Speaking of the future for the business, Tom added: "Audiences may be changing, growing and shifting. The technology they use may be changing, growing and shifting. Job boards will therefore change, grow and shift. But they won’t be going away.”