Review: Workthing (Verdict: 4.5/10) This review of Workthing was conducted as a secret shopper experience. We approached Workthing with a "hypothetical" vacancy, a PA role in a small financial services firm in Birmingham paying £18K. The job site did not know that this was a review. See Workthing whatjobsite profile. Reviewed: January 2008.

The Workthing website

Workthing is a long-established online recruitment brand, part of the Hotonline network of generalist and niche job boards in the UK, and owned by the media giant Trinity Mirror PLC. Its unique selling point is that it only advertises jobs "direct from employers." That is, it doesn't advertise any recruitment agency jobs —which should prove to be a real selling point for both candidates and employers.

Workthing offers recruiters a number of advertising options including credit card posting, account-managed service and CV search. When you advertise your job on Workthing it is also posted on other relevant sites in the Hotonline network such as PlanetRecruit, JobSearch, JobsFinancial, hotrecruit and the Graduate.

How Workthing works

Unfortunately looking at this site as a potential advertiser was something of a disappointment. The suggestion that Workthing only advertises job direct from employers appears to be dubious. We found countless recruitment agency jobs on the site. What's more, many of the employer jobs seemed to be from a small number of large corporate employers. There was also a great many generic "sales opportunities" and "work-from-home" type jobs which are known to be unattractive to candidates.

When we did a search for PA/admin jobs in Birmingham the best match we got was for a job in France. Then when we clicked on the "great opportunities from employers" link on the Workthing home page, there were no jobs for some of the employers. This was all very shoddy and casts serious doubts on the site.

The Workthing Products & Services

On the other hand, the Workthing recruiter area is very good. There is an excellent online demo of the site products and services. There is the online quickpost currently at £250 for a 28 day listing. You can't edit your job once it has been uploaded, nor can you add a logo. To add a logo brings the price of job posting to £400 (and this option doesn't seem to be available online.) There is also an option to have a company profile page and a "candidate sift" option for £1200. This seems a little expensive for a brochure page and a candidate filtering option. Many sites provide the latter for free. 

When we spoke to the sales team we were also told about the combined job posting and CV search for £600. This wasn't just a simple job posting, but a job slot that could be used for numerous jobs over the advertising period. The sales person also took me through the CV database search, allowing me to see in real time some of the CVs that were available. The results were pretty good. The sales person said that there were over 1.8 million CVs available to employers.   

Workthing user statistics and site demographics

On its "our statistics" page Workthing says it has "over 2.1 million job seekers searching our sites every month;" immediately below this there is the claim that there are "1.8 million visits by job seekers very month;" and immediately below that it says that there are "1.15 million ABCe audited figure of unique users for January 2005." It does not appear that any of these quoted figures are actually for Workthing itself and are, rather, figures for all the sites in the Hotonline network. The sales person quoted 1.2 million unique users in their patter, but at least made it very clear that it was across all of the Hotonline job sites.

A breakdown of the top searches for "Workthing" (though whether it is Workthing or Hotonline is unclear) puts IT as the most popular job search, followed by Admin which might suggest good things for our job.

Unfortunately, all of the many different figures quoted on the recruiter page are more than two and a half years old. These figures are pre-historic in internet terms.(Workthing also claims that its competitor monster.co.uk hasn't been ABCe audited, but it was audited in October 2006 and January 2007 and had over 2.2 million and 2.6 million unique users respectively.) Having your main sales page this out of date is very poor.

Workthing — the Pros and Cons

The Pros:  The Hotonline network, if not Workthing on its own, does deliver a significant audience of job seekers. How much of this potential audience your job will reach unclear but the information regarding the top job searches would suggest that admin is a popular area on Hotonline and Workthing. 

The Cons:  To be honest, we were very disappointed with Workthing. The search engine is weak, advertising links were out of date, the claim for employer-only jobs is doubtful and the potential audience is unclear. It was only after speaking to one of the sales team that we began to see Workthing as being a realistic advertising option. And that was only because it was part of the larger Hotonline network. The sales experience was very professional and very convincing (but that is what sales people are for, right?).

Overall Verdict: 4.5 out of 10.

Not a great score for Workthing. In this instance, the pro of being part of the the Hotonline network doesn't overturn all the cons about Workthing (the weak search engine, the sloppy advertising banners with no jobs, the doubtful claim for employer-only jobs and the very unclear audience).  It isn't getting the basics right. However, the CV search did seem to offer a reasonable option. There is at heart a conflict for Workthing: it sells itself on its employer-only focus while at the same time selling itself as part a network of sites that isn't employer-focussed... it only left us confused as to what it was trying to be.  

Go to Workthing profile.

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