Review: Fish4jobs.co.uk (Verdict: 9 out of 10) This review of Fish4jobs.co.uk 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. Go to the fish4jobs whatjobsite profile. Reviewed: October 2007.

The fish4jobs website

Fish4jobs is a very popular job site. It offers a good range of jobs (43,000 on the day we reviewed it) across the UK and also, because it is owned by a number of print media businesses, jobs also appear in local newspapers. The site itself is straight-forward and an easy-to-use provides plenty of additional advice for candidate. 

For the advertiser fish4jobs offers a number of ways of finding out about the advertising options. There is the phone, a live chat room and also email. Notably, fish4jobs is the first site we have reviewed that offers a telephone number exclusively for small employers. I think this is a real benefit both for the job site and the employer: it allows job site to be clear about how much money you are going to spend and, thus, tailor its response accordingly; and it allows employers to avoid all the irrelevant products that can sometimes get thrown at you.

How fish4jobs works

Just for a change, I emailed fish4jobs and was quite impressed when I got a response just 10 minutes. Many job sites simply don't reply to emails. The email encouraged me to phone an account manager, which I did.

The account manager asked me about my job and immediately started making helpful suggestions about how to make a success of my recruitment campaign. She told me that to succeed on fish4jobs my job title is very important. She suggested adding a couple of additional terms here to improve my chances. A nice touch was when she told me that, even though the job might involve some reception work, I shouldn't include this in the title. Having worked in recruitment before, she said, the term “receptionist” can put off administrators and office managers.

Another nice touch was that when I indicated that I wanted to advertise the job in about six weeks (meaning end of Nov) my sales exec said she'd prefer me to post the job after Christmas. Of course, advertising jobs in the weeks up to Christmas is usually pointless and the account manager got full marks on my trick question.

fish4jobs Products & Services

Fish4jobs offers advertisers the opportunity of advertising online via a web form (£149) or going for the account-managed service (prices start at £250). The online job posting is the usual job post with logo, web address and job description.

The Account Managed service I was quoted cost £350. In addtion to the posting on the fish4jobs website, my jobs would be added to yahoo hotjobs, google and be advertised in relevant local newspapers. I would also get 1 week CV access too. I would also receive what was called “instant match.” This is an interesting product which finds the 10 best matches for my job on the CV database. This is a good price for all these services.

The nice thing was that the Account Manager said she'd watch the job for me, make suggestions and recommend changes too. What was also nice was that the person I spoke to on the phone would be my account manager. It is much nicer to know that the person in whom you trust will be looking after you.

fish4jobs user statistics and site demographics

According to its latest ABCe audit Fish4jobs attracts over 1.4 million users per month. I do have to point out, however, that having looked at the audit certificate, there are many other sites that are included in this audit and not just Fish4jobs. However, in spite of this, fish4jobs does offer one of the largest job seeker audiences in the UK. 

What I really appreciated about the call to Fish4 was that the account manger could tell me exactly what I needed to know. For example, while I was on the phone the AM told me that in September there were 100,000 job searches for my job.  In addition, the AM told me that there were over 350,000 CVs in its database, and that there were 4,000 that matched my requirements.

As I was on the phone, the account manager also explained how I could avoid having to go through all 4,000 CVs and instead filter down to only those that are relevant. Another new development was the ability to see how “fresh” the CVs were. This can be a real benefit to avoid having to look at old and out of date CVs.

The pros: This was one of the best experiences I have had with a job site. The sales manager was efficient, knowledgeable, and could tailor her salesy bit to exaclty meet my needs. I received all the information I needed, and even some I didn't but was thankful for. The products offered were fine and the current offer (as of October 2007) of £350 for job ad and CV database access seemed like a good option. The traffic to the site is  very healthy. Fish4jobs also participates in the NORAS survey and a quick look at this independent report indicates that fish4jobs should be pretty good at a job like mine.

The cons: To be honest, I can't confess to any cons in my experience with talking to Fish4jobs.

Overall verdict 9 out of 10.

A good site with well trained and very capable sales people who seem to know what they are talking about. Well done. I think that, for good advice alone, it would be worth talking to fish4jobs about whatever role you have. Why didn't we give them a 10 out of 10? Well, there was one tiny niggle: the account  manager didn't know what price the online post a job was. She quoted me £250,when the price was actually £149. Apart from that, well done!

Go to the fish4jobs whatjobsite profile.

We hope our job site and job board reviews are of help to you. If you would like to comment on our reviews, or on whatjobsite in general, please click here. To find out more about how we evaluate job sites click here. For more information, articles and advice on job sites and job boards and online recruitment advertising visit our Recruitment Advice area. This job site review is only intended as a guide (see Disclaimer).

Go to the job site reviews