Review: s1jobs (Verdict: 9/10) This review of s1jobs was conducted as a secret shopper experience. We looked at s1jobs with a "hypothetical" vacancy to advertise in mind, an Admin/office manager role in a small financial services firm in Edinburgh paying between £18K and £20K. The job site did not know that this was a review. See s1jobs whatjobsite site profile. Reviewed: January 2008.

The s1jobs website

s1jobs is one of Scotland's leading job boards. For the job seeker, it offers the usual job board services of job search, jobs by email, CV upload and online profiles. It also offers a number of additional emerging services including RSS job feeds and a rather exciting new mobile phone application called "txt2apply." Using the latter, job seekers can apply to jobs via their mobile phone.

For recruiters s1jobs offers one of the best recruiter sections we have seen so far in our reviews. The recruiter section is extensive, detailed and thorough. We would normally recommend talking to a job site to find out as much as you can before spending your money with them. However, s1jobs provides so much good information in such a straightforward and easy-to-grasp way that in the end we didn't even feel the need to call the website.

How s1jobs works

If you are an advertiser this site is a real treat to use. There are tutorials on everything and all of the information you could need on how good the site is for a particular job is there. There are the usual key stats like average number of unique users etc. but there is also a tool that lets you drill down and explore stats in more detail. 

For example, we did a search for admin/secretarial/pa jobs and learned that the average number of applications per direct employer for admin/secretarial/pa vacancy was 54; that the number of s1jobs users receiving admin/secretarial/pa email alerts was 25,715; and that the number of people with admin/secretarial/pa skills in the s1jobs Candidate Database was 17,994. It even told us that the size of the nearest competitor's audience was just 26% that of s1jobs. In other words, s1jobs gives you everything you need to be able to make a real advertising decision.

The s1jobs Products & Services

There are two options, the online job posting and the account-managed service. We looked at the online job posting as it seemed to offer everything we needed for our job. The quoted price was £299 plus VAT for a 2 week job posting. This price includes the email alert, logo and the ability to add candidate screening questions.

In addition, for the same £299 advertisers get access to the s1jobs CV database, the Candidate Match service and a full online applicant management system. S1jobs provided excellent online tutorials on all of these services. On exploring the CV database, however, we was a little worried by the vast number of non-UK CVs registered on the database. The Candidate Match system is a service exclusively offered (so it is claimed) to employers. When you post your job on s1jobs you are also alerted to all the candidates whose online profiles match your requirements. You can then email and invite these matching candidates to apply for your job. The online applicant management system offers impressive functionality to allow you to manage job seeker applications.

There are other advertising products available such as featured employer buttons on the home page, banners, overlays and corporate profile pages.

s1jobs user statistics and site demographics

The latest audited monthly unique users figure were for Oct 2007 and quoted 441,679. In addition, the site claimed 77,671 job seekers in its candidate database, that there were 205,252 applications to direct employers in Oct 2007, 78,031 jobs by email subscribers, and that 97% of s1users live in Scotland. We tried to find the supporting evidence for this last claim but couldn't. And our quick review of the CV database would seem to cast doubt over this claim. That being said, s1jobs is quite clearly a Scotland-only website. 

s1jobs — the Pros and Cons

The Pros: This is an excellent site which can make a serious claim to being Scotland's leading job site. The statistics are strong, the products are good, and the price is reasonable.

The Cons:  Apart from some of the statistics, we could find very few cons to s1jobs.

Overall Verdict: 9 out of 10.

Yes, we give s1jobs almost top marks. This site provided us with everything we needed to make a decision on our advertising. Indeed, for us, s1jobs is an example of how to present relevant information for advertisers, whether they be professionals or one off advertisers. The information is clear, relevant and to easy to understand. A very good recruiter experience. Well done to s1jobs!

Go to the s1jobs whatjobsite site profile.

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