Review: Jobcentre Plus (Verdict: 3/10) This review of Jobcentre Plus was conducted as a secret shopper experience. We looked at Jobcentre Plus with a "hypothetical" vacancy to advertise, an Admin/office manager role in a small financial services firm in Birmingham paying between £18K and £20K. The job site did not know that this was a review. See Jobcentre Plus whatjobsite site profile. Reviewed: January 2008.

The Jobcentre Plus website

Jobcentre Plus is an employment service as well as a website. Run by the UK government, its aim is to find employment for the unemployed. Jobs are advertised via the website and via the touch screens located in Jobcentre Plus offices across the UK. For the job seeker, Jobcentre Plus offers a basic job board. We found the search function a little "clunky" and there is no jobs by email service.

For employers, Jobcentre Plus offers free advertising. There are recruitment agencies advertising on the site, but they don't seem to be too numerous. The site is free, government backed, so you know it's trustworthy.

How Jobcentre Plus works

There are a number of ways to advertise your jobs on Jobcentre Plus. You can email your job, fax it or you can sign up for the Employers Direct Online service and post the job onto the site yourself. The latter service has two types of users, Approved and Unapproved. Approved users (you have to apply for approval) are volume recruiters and are able to post jobs onto the site directly; unapproved users are one-off job advertisers and will have their job ads checked by the Employers Direct online team before being posted on the Jobcentre Plus website.

The Jobcentre Plus Products & Services

There's not a lot on offer on the Jobcentre Plus website. The online posting service is pretty basic and doesn't offer any candidate screening facility.

If you don't go down the online route and instead advertise your job via a local Jobcentre Plus office (who will post it onto the site anyway) you will be able to benefit, it is claimed, from a number of very handy services: the local office will provide you with a person to help you fill your vacancies, give information about available people in the locality and other details of the local labour market. They can also offer specialist help and advice on training, rates of pay, equal opportunities and employing people with disabilities. The local Jobcentre Plus office can also manage the application process for you and provide interview rooms. 

Jobcentre Plus user statistics and site demographics

The only published statistics we could find on the site stated that in a week in March 2007 2.2 million online job seekers conducted 6.5 million job searches. This is an impressive claim and would probably make Jobcentre Plus the single biggest recruitment site in the UK. And it consistently ranks as number one in the Hitwise survey of popular job sites.

However, when you read the detail you find that the "2.2 million" figure quoted is actually a count of "user visits." A "user visit" is the count of a single visit a website, and is a long way from being a count of individual online job seekers. For example, the same people could come back to the site again and again and it would count as a more and more visits, but it's not more and more job seekers. In addition, the traffic to the Jobcentre Plus website is not only for job seekers. It's also for benefit claimants as well so you have additional non-job seeker traffic using the site.

In truth, very little information exists about the make up of the website audience. Looking at the jobs on the site, we found that the overwhelming majority of positions are under the £20,000. We looked for jobs with higher salaries but found very few. This would suggest that the site is for the lower level positions. This would make sense. The majority of unemployed people would be going into jobs at this level. If you call a local Jobcentre Plus office, you may be able to find out about people who have registered in that office who are looking for your particular job.

Jobcentre Plus — the Pros and Cons

The Pros:

It's free. That's a very big pro. The other pro is that the service offered by the Jobcentre Plus local offices is extensive, and even if you don't advertise with them, you could use them as a employment resource.

The Cons:  

There are two cons: firstly, it's hard to find out who uses the site. Secondly, you have to ask if you don't know who is using it, is it worth going through the process? It might be free, but is it worth your time?

Overall Verdict: 3 out of 10.

We scored Jobcentre Plus low because it couldn't do the basics: we couldn't find any information about who was using the site (though we could get information on who was registered at a local office.) We could find no information on popular job searches or locations or likely response. Jobcentre Plus doesn't provide jobs by email, email sponsorship, banner advertising, CV database etc. That being said, all jobs are treated equally, so your job will have as good a chance of getting a response as any other one.

So, Jobcentre Plus is free. But your time isn't. Having to go through the process with Jobcentre Plus could take a lot of time. It would be frustrating to start on the whole process and then get nothing for it. It'd be nice if you could at least know what it's good at before you start. Go to Jobcentre Plus whatjobsite profile 

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