Review: Telegraph Jobs (Verdict: 5/10) This review of jobs.telegraph.co.uk was conducted as a secret shopper experience. We looked at jobs.telegraph.co.uk with a "hypothetical" vacancy to advertise in mind, a "receptionist" role in a small financial services firm in north London paying between £18K and £22K. The job site did not know that this was a review. See Telegraph Jobs. Reviewed: March 2008.

The Telegraph Jobs website

jobs.telegraph.co.uk is the job board for the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers. It's a nice elegant site offering all the usual (and some not so usual) products and services for both candidates and employers. For candidates it offers job search, CV upload and careers advice. See below for the employer products and services.  

How Telegraph Jobs  works

Jobs.telegraph.co.uk offers a straightforward online credit card job posting service as well an account managed service. If you want to take advantage of any of the additional advertising products beyondthe credit card post, you'll need to contact the sales team directly.  

The Telegraph Jobs Products & Services

The online job post costs a hefty £500 (plus VAT) for a fully branded job ad for one month. According to the media pack, this price will also include a 6x1 (I am guessing this is inches) ad in the Thursday print addition of the Telegraph. The account managed service includes this option but also allows you to add some additional products. A Featured Job gives you an ad on the jobs.telegraph.co.uk home page as well as key positioning in search results for £1000 (plus VAT), or you can send emails to relevant candidates for £1000 (plus VAT) per email shot. 

There are a number of other products which are quite interesting. Jobs.telegraph provides psychometric testing, video job ads and a reference checking service. There is no CV database facility mentioned on the site but this service is available when you ring up the sales team.

Telegraph Jobs user statistics and site demographics

Sadly, there is very little on the jobs.telegraph site to let you know what kind of audience it attracts. The only statistics on the site are for the telegraph.co.uk site (the online newspaper) whose audience is far from relevant for job advertising purposes. When we spoke to the sales team they said that our "receptionist" job was very popular on jobs.telegraph, but they could not give us definitive numbers. They said they would have to investigate the stats and send them through later (along with numbers for the CV database.) Alas, we got nothing from them so we can say nothing further. 

This poor service and response is a shame because jobs.telegraph has long been an integral part of the NORAS study on job sites. Precise and independently verified information of its user audience is available (if only the sales team were familiar with it). From our research of the available data, we found that jobs.telegraph attracts around 402,997 unique users a month (ABCE January 2008). According to the NORAS 2008 audience survey of jobs.telegraph.co.uk, the most popular industry sectors it covers are construction, engineering, health and education. The most popular job roles are general management, sales, retail and teaching.

This would seem to tally with the kinds of jobs that jobs.telegraph advertises. On the day that we looked at the site, there were 7774 jobs on the site. Of these over 70% fell into the industry categories of construction, engineering and education and training though we did not do an analysis of job types. Also, from a review of the job inventory, the sites would appear to be targeted at more senior roles (albeit our sample was small.)

Telegraph Jobs  — the Pros and Cons

The Pros:

A lovely, clean and fast site with some nice touches. It offers solid products and service to candidates and recruiters alike. It also benefits from being an established brand with some interesting products.

The Cons:  

The online recruitment advertising section is a letdown. There was simply not enough information for us to be able to make any kind of decision about whether this would be a good place to advertise our "receptionist" job. Also, £500 for a job ad (even if it does include a print ad too) was quite steep for what we got. The sales service not too good either. The sales person we got was less than helpful.

Overall Verdict: 5 out of 10.

A disappointing time with this site. The online recruitment information was weak as was our sales experience. That being said, from our research, it does seem that the Telegraph Jobs does deliver a valuable audience. It might not the right one for this job but may well be worth considering for senior roles in construction, engineering and teaching.  

Go to whatjobsite jobs.telegraph.co.uk profile. 

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