Review: Scotcareers (Verdict: 5/10) This review of Scottish job site Scotcareers was conducted as a secret shopper experience. We looked at Scotcareers with a "hypothetical" vacancy to advertise in mind, a Receptionist role in a small accountancy firm in Edinburgh paying between £18K and £20K. The job site did not know that this was a review. See the Scotcareers site profile. Reviewed: February 2008.

The Scotcareers website

Scotcareers is part of the Scottish Daily Record & Sunday Mail (which itself is part of Trinity Mirror Plc.) The site is clean and nicely laid out. For the job seeker, Scotcareers offers all the usual services (jobs by email, CV upload, online account to manage applications.) 

We did find searching for jobs a little clunky. For example, when we searched "office managers" we got from accountant jobs and to Tax manager jobs, but not an office manager amongst them. The problem may be that Scotcareers only offers job seekers the ability to search for jobs according to industry sector, location etc. but does not offer any standard job role search. The only way to search for job roles is with free text and this, of course, will lead to a lot of false positives. Searching for our job "receptionist," however, worked like a treat.

For recruiters, Scotcareers offers all the usuals: job posting, candidate management, banners, search sponsorship. There is a reasonable recruiter's section which will answer some, though not all, of your questions.

How Scotcareers works

Scotcareers offers an online job posting service and an account-managed service. The online job posting is a standard 2 week unbranded job posting costing £250 + Vat. You can also add your logo for an extra £100 but this can only be done by contacting Scotcareers, which may be worth doing as the account managed service offers you additional products and services.

The Scotcareers Products & Services

As indicated above, Scotcareers offers an online job posting service and an account-managed service. The online job posting is a standard 2 week unbranded job posting running at £250 + Vat. To add the logo and benefit from an account managed service will cost £350. But the account managed service also gives you the ability to upgrade to additional products and services such as the "Star Vacancy" which puts your job at the top of the search results. As you would expect, the site also provides a number of good display advertising options (banners and home page recruiter buttons) email sponsorships and some rich media products. There is also, of course, CV database access coming in at a rather hefty £500 per month (not including the job ad).

Scotcareers user statistics and site demographics

On the day we looked at the site, there were 8342 jobs, 7499 of which were in Scotland. Of these 338 were from employers. Having looked at the inventory of the employer jobs, it does seem that a small number of large employers account for the majority of these jobs. Of course, there's no harm in that but it would make one wonder how a single job posting might do.  

There is a dedicated area in the recruiters section focusing on the demographic breakdown of Scotcareers users. Scotcareers quotes a few different monthly unique users counts, but the April 2007 ABCE audit puts the number at a healthy 151,260. Scotcareers was also part of the 2007 NORAS survey, and has a NORAS logo to prove it, but did not participate this year 2008. It seems a bit misleading to have the NORAS logo and not be a participant.  

There was something rather shoddy about the recruiters centre.  For example, there is much made of the top 10 searched sectors and locations but the site images detailing this information are missing. We tried a number of browsers (Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari) but got nothing. We hope that this will have been corrected by time you read this.

Scotcareers — the Pros and Cons

The Pros:

The main pro for Scotcareers is that it is dedicated to Scotland. Its NORAS 2007 results show that just under 90% of its audience is in Scotland. Its demographic information would also suggest that it should be pretty good for our job.

The Cons:  

It's backed by the giant Trinity Mirror Plc, but the shoddiness of the site would place doubts in anybody's mind regarding how serious Scotcareers takes its offering. It wouldn't take much to improve things, just someone to cast an occasional careful eye over the site.

Overall Verdict: 5 out of 10.

Scotcareers is nice site with a good solid audience and product suite that is, unfortunately, let down badly by some very basic content errors. Perhaps, by the time you read this these will have been rectified. But here's the rub: one can't help but fear that a shoddy site will be indicative of a shoddy service. See the Scotcareers site profile. 

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