Review: totaljobs (Verdict: 7 out of 10) This job board review of totaljobs was conducted as a secret shopper experience. We approached the site with a "hypothetical" vacancy. The role to be advertised was an Admin/Office Manager role for a small financial services company in North London, of £22 to £26K. The job site did not know that this was a review call. See the totaljobs whatjobsite profile. Reviewed: October 2007.

The totaljobs website

Totaljobs is one of the UK's leading generalist sites and part of the TotalJobsGroup, owner of a large number of specialist recruitment sites. It is a long established and well respected brand in online recrutiment. For the candidate totaljobs offers all the usual services: jobs by email, an online account to manage applications, and a stored CV that allows for easy job applications.  For the recruiter totaljobs offers a pretty good service too providing credit card posting or account managed service, online applicant managment tools, candidate screening and a CV database search. It also provides a very informative recruiter area.

How totaljobs works

We intially contacted totaljobs by email. Unfortunately, there was a very slow turn around on the email. We got a reply four days later. Poor service. And after all that time the email informed us that the best and most cost effective option for our ad was to post via the credit card service on the site.

We then emailed again asking for demographic information specific to our job. Totaljobs customer service responded, promptly this time, by asking us to provide our contact details so that someone could contact us. We didn't provide this information as we were conducting a Secret Shopper and, rather like Superman, didn't want to reveal our secret identity. Thankfully, and with due respect to totaljobs, all the information we needed was provided on the site.

Totaljobs Products & Services

At the time of this review, the online unbranded posting was £175 for a 28 day listing (normal price £250). There is another online ratecard on the site which states the price of an ad is £350 (this may be for the account managed service, but we couldn't be sure.) This ratecard also gives prices for other products like "Featured Jobs" (which include a logo) at £450 and a £500 "Premium Job" which seems to be some kind of bespoke vacancy advertisement.

Unlike many of its competitors, totaljobs doesn't provide an all-in-one job posting and CV product. Totaljobs does offer CV search, but the lowest price we could find on the site came in at £500 per month. This would be prohibitively expensive for a one-off campaign.

Totaljobs user statistics and site demographics

While we didn't get info on the specific audience for our job from anybody at totaljobs, (and we didn't call) the site did provide pertinent information on the user audience. Basic stats are outlined: 1.9 million unique users to the site in October 2006 (the latest ABCE audit stats from March 2007 come in at 1.8 million), producing just over 800,000 applications to more than 100,000 jobs. There were also 200,000 CVs on the database.

Totaljobs also provides a useful list of the top 20 searches on its site. Three of the top 20 search terms related to administration jobs (administrator, admin, admnistration) which would indicate that admin roles are particularly popular on totaljobs. The site also gives a handy breakdown of the location of its audience. In other words, the totaljobs recruiter area provides good information on the most popular jobs on the site but for more uncommon jobs it would be best to talk to the sales team. 

Totaljobs — the Pros and Cons

The Pros: The online job posting product is competitively priced and the site provided enough information for us to be able to make a confident decision. For other less common jobs, we would have to recommend talking to the site. Incidentally, totaljobs also runs free e-recruitment seminars around the United Kingdom which give an introduction to online recruitment and job board advertising. From reports we have heard, these seminars are informative and unbiased —not simply a selling opportunity for totaljobs. To find out more, click here. 

The Cons:  The four-day delay in responding to our initial email was unfortunate and disappointing. If we had really been advertising a job and not just doing a secret shoper we would simply have gone to a different site. Of course, emails do get lost and forgotten about, but our tip to avoid this potential problem is to telephone the site.

Overall Verdict: 7 out of 10.

A good site for both the candidate and the recruiter. The poor initial customer service was quite off-putting but, that irritation out of the way, there is no doubt that totaljobs provides a very good online offering. We found everything we needed to be able to make up our minds about the site. For our office manager job, it would seem to be worth a punt. Go to the totaljobs whatjobsite profile. 

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