Review: Guardian Jobs (Verdict: 5 out of 10) This review of Guardian Jobs was conducted as a secret shopper experience. We approached the site with a "hypothetical" vacancy, an Admin/office manager role in a small financial services firm in north London paying between £22K and £24K. The job site did not know that this was a review call. See the Guardian Jobs whatjobsite site profile.  Reviewed: October 2007.

The Guardian Jobs website

The recently relaunched (at time of this review October 2007) Guardian Jobs website continues to be one of the UK's more popular job sites. Candidates can search for jobs, upload their CV and sign up for job matching (see below for details.) 

How Guardian Jobs works

Although Guardian Jobs does offer a full account-managed service, the recruiter area of the site is quite expansive and gives a good overview of the site offering. There are details of the job posting options as well as the other advertising products. There is also a credit card posting option.  

Our call was dealt with by a very capable account manager. She answered all our questions and was quite open about what information she didn't have. The two questions I asked were answered in a prompt follow up email. (Well done on that)

The Guardian Jobs Products & Services

The most basic product is the text listing for £700. This is a one-month unbranded (no logo) job ad on Guardian Jobs. The job also appears on relevant sites on the Guardian Unlimited network and is emailed to candidates.

Next comes the premium job listing, which seems to be the same as a text listing except that it has a logo on it, and costs £1000. Other products include banners and buttons, and home page "job of the day" spots. One product that looked particularly promising was "keywords." The job ad can be linked to relevant keywords or search terms. When a candidate types in your keyword, your vacancy will appear at the top of the search results.

Guardian Jobs also offers a type of CV search, called job match. Unlike other sites, you don't search through the many thousands of CVs on the database; rather, candidates create an online profile. As jobs are posted to the site, jobs that match these profiles are emailed directly to the candidates. I was assured that there is a human involved in reviewing these matches (a good idea with the oft-lamented false positives of fully technological CV search options.)

Guardian Jobs user statistics and site demographics

Our account manager gave us all the headline figures we requested. Guardian Jobs is ABCE audited and counts 700,322 unique users a month. Also Guardian Jobs participated in the NORAS Survey, allowing a headline analysis of the users. Admin would appear to be a top three area and the strength of site seems to be in the public sector, education and media sectors, which will come as no surprise.

Guardian Jobs — the Pros and Cons

The Pros: We really like the new look of Guardian Jobs. It's a lovely clean site. It covers a broad range of jobs and seems to have real strengths in the Education, Public Sector and Media sectors. It also offers a nice range of advertising products.  

The Cons: At £700, Guardian Jobs costs considerably more than all of its competitors, which are all in the £150 to £350 price range. It costs another £300 to add a logo, making it £1000 for a one month job ad —a price that seems excessive.  

Overall Verdict: 5 out of 10.

An excellent site with a really good offering. In truth, it didn't seem to the best site for our hypothetical job (i.e. we were looking to fill a job in the financial services sector,) a fact which was acknowledged by our account manager. This honesty was appreciated and we say well done to Guardian Jobs for being honest about its strengths rather than just taking the money.

In general, from what we learned in our review, while it mightn't be the best site for our job, it would seem to be a good bet for public sector, education, and media sectors. However, that £700 price tag does seem a little high and contributed to our conservative ranking of this site. Go to the Guardian Jobs whatjobsite profile.

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