How to spot bad job sites – part 1
Posted: January 14th, 2010 under Help and Advice.
Tags: bad job sites, employer recruiters, Online Recruitment, special offers
1 Check for contact info
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be doing a series of online recruitment articles on how to spot bad job sites. Our goal with these articles is to give less expert online recruiters the tools and knowledge to make better job site choices.
With many thousands of job sites in the UK and more being launched every week it is becoming harder and harder to wade through the sheer volume of recruitment websites and spot the bad ones. These series of articles should help you sort the wheat from the chaff.
Our first tip to spot bad job sites is to look for contact information. This is a very quick pointer to job site quality. You will come across countless job sites whose only method of contact is an email web-form. There’s no address; there’s no telephone number: just the web-form. This should be an alarm bell. Stay well away.
If the only way to contact a job site is by sending an email via a web-form then you have to question their commitment to their customers. Do you know any proper business that offers only a web-form to contact its sales team and to deal with its customers? Of course not. Even the most online of online businesses will offer proper contact information.
‘But,’ you might say, ‘the job site looks legit. It’s got lots of jobs and some very well-known recruitment agencies advertising on it.’
Don’t be fooled. Nine times out of ten, these job sites are “Zombie job sites.” Zombie job sites have all the appearance of being real live job sites with lots of jobs, and lots of flashy banners, but they are in actuality, dead. They maintain the appearance of life by carrying lots of free advertising from a small number of recruitment agencies.
What’s worse, however, is that many of these Zombie job sites will have a “special introductory” rate or a too-good-to-be-true advertising price for credit card posting. Well, there’s nothing special about the price and it is too good to be true. These sites will have few candidates visiting them, meaning there’ll be few candidates visiting your job ad.
There’s also the small matter of the law. Businesses that sell products and services online are required by law to provide an address of their place of business. The reason for this is precisely to help customers protect themselves from poor quality and dodgy businesses. In truth, these job sites are not actually being run as a proper job site business.
The moral of the story is that is there’s no contact information, it’s a bad job site. Don’t take the risk. There are plenty of good quality and cost-effective job sites out there.
As for special offers: check out our special offer section or simply ask the job site when you call them up.