Review: Reed.co.uk Freecruitment (Verdict: 6 out of 10) This review of the Reed.co.uk Freecruitment job site was conducted as part of our ongoing series of secret shopper reviews. In this case, however, we did not contact the job site. Reed.co.uk does not offer this service. Our hypothetical job role was an admin/office manager in a financial services firm in North London  on a salary of between £22K and £26K.  Go to Reed.co.uk site profile. Reviewed: October 2007.

The Reed.co.uk website

The Reed Freecruitment job site (and it is free to advertise) is owned and operated by Reed, the chain of high street recruitment consultancies. A pretty good site for and popular with job seekers, its biggest attraction by far is the number of jobs. On the day of our review there were approximately 353,000 jobs on the site. It offers the basic services of jobs by email and CV upload. Job seekers registering on Reed.co.uk agree to allow their CV details to be made available to Reed’s national network of recruitment consultants which, presumably, is how Reed profits from maintaining the Freecruitment site.

How Reed.co.uk works

Everything is done online, so there is no account management, and no feedback if things go wrong. However, for an online service what it offers is pretty good and in some cases is beyond what some paid-for sites offer. 

To advertise your jobs on Reed.co.uk you have to set up an account. This is a very simple and intuitive process. Once your account is activated you are free to add your job. Again, this is an extremely straightforward  process and I can't imagine anybody having any problems with it. There is plenty of good material on the site to refer to when writing your job ad. There is no branding available on the site, but Reed.co.uk job posting also allows you to set eligibility and screening questions to avoid being inundated with unsuitable candidates.

Once your job is posted, you can then manage your job and applicants via your online account. The account offers a pretty good candidate management system, allowing you to track, review, and rate candidates and also set up autorespond messages if required.  

The Reed.co.uk Products

For the purposes of this review there was only one product on offer, namely, the free job posting product. One other option offered by the site is to ability to send your job to a local Reed branch for them to recruit for you at a special discounted rate. This is another way in which the Reed agency profits from maintaining the Freecruitment site. Whatjobsite doesn't review recruitment consultants, so we will say no more about that.

Reed.co.uk user statistics and site demographics

According to its ABCE audit in February 2007 Reed attracted just over 1.4 million unique users a month which produced over 1 million applications.  Other statistics on the site stated that, for September 2007, there had been 9 million job views, producing 900,000 applications, for 66,000 jobs. A quick bit of lateral mathematics gives us an indicative figure of 13 or 14 applications per job, which would seem to be a healthy response.  

Clearly, however, not every job will get the same response. There are some job roles that will do better than others. Again, according to the Reed.co.uk site itself, Admin/Secretarial jobs top the table of candidate registrations, which would suggest that these types of job ads  should do very well. IT and accounting roles also appear to be very strong.

Reed.co.uk — the Pros and Cons

The Pros: One very big pro here: it's free. We at whatjobsite would usually advise against using free job sites. Job sites are most often free because they are just starting up and are trying to attract candidates or they are just closing down and don't have any candidates. Reed is different. It is a long-established and well-regarded job site.

The Cons: The lack of account management and branding possibilities are our only criticisms here, but those criticisms seem petty when you get so much else for free.

Overall Verdict: 6 out of 10.

By rights Reed.co.uk should score higher in our review, but as we evaluate and rate job sites for account management and all the bells and whistles that go along with account management, not having it has reduced the Reed.co.uk site overall score. In our view, this is a reasonably good site with good traffic and, most importantly, a super low price of nothing at all.  A look at the statistics available would seem to point to Reed.co.uk being a good place for our secretarial and admin role. More generally, Reed.co.uk mightn't be suitable for every vacancy, but being free, if it doesn't work you haven't lost anything. Go to the Reed.co.uk whatjobsite profile.

UPDATE: In November 2007, Reed.co.uk added paid-for branded listing option to its suite of previously free job posting. They have also added a telephone number (perhaps an account managed service) to its job sites. As these products are new, we will wait a little before reviewing this site again. Go to the Reed.co.uk whatjobsite profile for more details.

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