Two young Australians say their start-up company will fill a big gap in the agricultural recruitment marketplace.

Finding the right staff in a hurry can be a time-consuming and frustrating process for farmers.

The real pressure intensifies at harvest; everyone is watching the clock, and watching the skies in fear of rain.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 6 minutes 42 seconds 6 m A new tool for farm recruitment ( Sally Bryant ) Download 3.1 MB

The first sign of cloud can cause real panic, particularly if the harvesting contractor is held up or has a mechanical breakdown.

But now the answer to that stress could come from a different sort of "cloud", the virtual marketplace that is the internet.

It is this gap in the market that two young Australians hope to fill with their start-up company "Contractor Cloud".

Andrew MacAlpine and his business partner Tim Lee have first-hand experience of how hard farmers find it to fill jobs in a hurry, and they decided that modern technology could be a big part of the answer.

"I've seen these situations with my father," Mr MacAlpine said.

"Let's say the contractor rings up at the last moment and says he can't get there, we've got an expensive crop sitting in the paddock and we've been told rain is on the way.

"And suddenly you are in a really dire predicament, and that's when you start ringing around.

"But the problem is that 95 per cent of the people you are ringing already have work."

However the advantage of establishing a virtual recruitment marketplace, according to Contractor Cloud's inventors, is that you are only speaking to people who are specifically interested in your sort of job.

As Mr MacAlpine explained, the platform has been set up to be interactive between buyer and seller.

"What this program allows farmers and contractors to do is to establish their own profile and then set up a series of alerts, based on their needs," he said.

"This way the contractor is alerted every time a farmer posts a job that he might be interested in, that he has the equipment and expertise to handle."