Review: (Jobs.ie Verdict: 9 out of 10) This review of Jobs.ie was conducted as a secret shopper experience. We approached the site with a "hypothetical" vacancy. The role to be advertised was an Admin/Secretary job for an estate agents office based in Dublin 2 on a salary of €25 to 28K. The job site did not know that this was a review call. Go to the Jobs.ie whatjobsite profile. Reviewed: September 2007.

The Jobs.ie website

A straight-forward and easy to use site for job seekers with all the standard offering that you would expect including jobs-by-email, online CV's etc. Good inventory of jobs and a good number of employer jobs too (see below.) There is no salary search which must be a significant annoyance for job seekers.

How Jobs.ie works

My call was taken by an account manager who quickly, efficiently and knowledgeably went through my job and advertising needs. She asked me about the vacancy and did a search for similar roles on the site and pointed out other small employers advertising. The Account Manager also said that my job was very popular and that I could expect about 60 applications. It was nice to get an indication of what to expect.

What was also nice about Jobs.ie was that the Account Manager indicated that I could send the job description to her and she'd put it on the site for me, so I'd avoid all that tedious uploading business. She also said that she would keep an eye on response over the advertising period and if there were any issues she'd contact me. Candidate applications would be emailed twice daily.

Another nice touch was that the Account Manager indicated that she herself would pre-screen candidates for me to make sure they were relevant. This was are real benefit as going through irrelevant candidates can be one of the more frustrating aspects of online recruitment. Without much prying on my part, the Account Manager also went into the Jobs.ie marketing strategy and took me through a few of their Adwords campaigns. I was quite impressed with the thorough knowledge displayed by the account manager.

Jobs.ie User statistics and site demographics

The number of registered users quoted was 350,000 (whatjobsite has independently confirmed this figure) with an average of 9,000 applications made daily. There are approximately 4,000 jobs on the site. An interesting claim made by the Account Manager was that Jobs.ie limits the number of recruitment agency job ads to 20% of the total number of jobs on the site. Many jobs sites allow recruitment agencies unlimited advertising which results in huge number of jobs to compete with yours. In addition, it is not unknown for recruitment agencies to post the same job again and again, making it harder for employers to attract candidates. This limit on recruitment agency jobs should offer a real benefit.

The Jobs.ie Products

The first quoted product was the €295 +VAT one-month job ad. This included the full job description, logos and necessary edits and updates.

The second option was the €475 job posting and CV search. The CV search allowed up to 100 CV downloads over the one-month advertising period.

The third options was the €1,800 yearly deal which allowed 3 job ads per month.

All job advertising packages also included a three-line lineage ad in the Star newspaper on Thursdays and Saturdays). I am unsure whether this is a temporary offer or an ongoing offer.

Jobs.ie — the Pros and Cons

The Pros: Great initial customer service experience. The Account Manager filled me with confidence that she would do her best to make the job work. Her knowledge was also impressive. This might be due to the fact that, according to her, each Account Manager specialised in certain industry sectors. This can only be a good thing, allowing each account manager to develop real “expertise.”

I was also quite impressed with her suggesting that I change the name of the job to Office Manager. A proactive suggestion like this can make the difference between success and failure of a job vacancy.  Another nice touch was the sending of a handy job specification template along with the media pack

The Cons: A small issue really but when I asked how often the CV search was cleaned of old and out-of-date CV's, the Account Manager led me to believe that this wasn't done at all. It seems that CV's that are years old are still on the system. It would be hard to know how valuable 5 year old CV's would be for any candidate search.

Overall Verdict: 9 out of 10.

A very good experience. The only reason we didn't give it a  10 out of 10 was because of the vagueness regarding the CV database. However, the overall level of knowledge of the Account Manager was excellent and the services provided (including job uploading and a full account management service) seems to offer real value for money. Go to the Jobs.ie job site profile. 

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