gis-a-job.com

Gis a Job have picked a vaguely amusing name for their recruitment website. You might think, given their name, that their intention is to advertise jobs that are available for people to take.

I look at their site however and can only conclude that this is not the case. Let me put this plainly. The purpose of online recruitment sites is simple - to connect job seekers with employers. That's it.

This works as follows. ...
...puts the details of the vacancy on the job site (or gives them to an agency who put in on the site as part of their effort to find him an employee). A merry little job seeker comes to the site, looks through the available jobs and submits his CV.

This we might imagine is relatively simple. After all, it's all done with databases isn't it? You know, the employer or agency simply fills in the details of the job in an online form and ... more

Gis a Job have picked a vaguely amusing name for their recruitment website. You might think, given their name, that their intention is to advertise jobs that are available for people to take.

I look at their site however and can only conclude that this is not the case. Let me put this plainly. The purpose of online recruitment sites is simple - to connect job seekers with employers. That's it.

This works as follows. An employer needs to hire someone. For a fee, he puts the details of the vacancy on the job site (or gives them to an agency who put in on the site as part of their effort to find him an employee). A merry little job seeker comes to the site, looks through the available jobs and submits his CV.

This we might imagine is relatively simple. After all, it's all done with databases isn't it? You know, the employer or agency simply fills in the details of the job in an online form and away it goes. The job seeker then uses the handy search facility to search the available jobs. Obviously there are lots of different pieces of information that might be available about the job. Where it's based, the salary, the job title, the skills required, if driving is involved, if security clearance (MOD work) is required. All these details go in the database and the job seeker simply searches against them. Right?

Wrong. According to gisajob.com your location consists of the County you live in (or want to search under). You can't search for jobs that are just in one city. Presumably because everybody (as gisajob.com know) drives... don't they? Everybody can commute for an hour or so with no problems... can't they? Well, no, they can't. Some people have no option but to get a job in a particular city. They need to be able to search for just jobs in that city.

They also need to be able to search for a job under a particular skill. 'Oracle' is the example used on the site. Great. If you have a particular skill that you are keen to use you can search by that. Wonderful. What if you have many skills that you would be equally happy to use? In that case you're fine too. Gisajob allows you to search for as many terms as you want. This is great and I'm not knocking it. What I will knock is the fact you can't choose not to use a search term. This is also a problem because not everyone uses the same term to describe the same skill, especially for more general skills.

This restriction is quite simply insane. It means that jobs can quite easily be entered which no-one will ever find. It means you can't do a nice simple search for all the jobs in a county. It means that you can't search for all the recently posted jobs (even though gisajob.com allows you to choose only recent jobs within certain bands).

What else can you search on? 'Sector' such as 'I.T.' there's quite a comprehensive list of sectors you can choose from, including 'All sectors'. This though is surely redundant when you're going to be forced to fill in the skills field anyway? I don't imagine there's too many jobs in 'Accountancy' that require skills in Oracle.

I'd like to search by salary. I am you see, a fairly junior I.T. bod. To be accurate I'm about as junior as you can get. It's no good my looking at jobs for £30,000 a year. I can't get them as I don't have the skills for them. Why then, can I not exclude them from my searches?

I have to be fair at this point. If we ignore the fact that the search facility is quite shockingly bad on this site the rest of it isn't too bad.

I'd like to offer some comment on the range and quantity of the jobs that are available on the site, I'd expect to do this by looking at jobs on the site in my own field of in-expertise. Of course, due to the restrictive search facility I can't do this. I've tried a number of search terms that might apply, I've even tried to be clever and search for 'a' and '.' which I would have thought would be in all the jobs but this doesn't seem to work, unfortunately.

I would guess that there are indeed a lot of jobs advertised on the site. I would guess that it's possible to search them if you happen to have some precise skills (and they've been accurately listed in the job adverts).

I have to say it looks like the best way to get yourself a job through this website is to submit your CV to them and hope that someone sees it and takes an interest. I'm not a recruiter so I'm not going to take a guess at how well that side of the operation works. However judging by other reviews on Ciao and by comments on the website I'd say that you'll have most success with this site by submitting your CV. Maybe that explains the awful search facilities but it certainly does not excuse them.

As a note I should say that I use job sites on a daily basis and there are none that I think are worthy of a 5 star review. Mostly this is because they have very poor search facilities - gisajob.com is certainly not alone in this though it is a particularly bad example.

The only way that I can see these sites becoming truly useful to job seekers is for them to all accept that all the information on a job should be searchable within user defined limits. They also need to stop forcing you to search for certain fields as happens on some sites. Salary, job title, skills, location (let us type it in if we don't like what's on your list), permanent/contract and date the job was posted should all be available.

I wouldn't recommend that anyone use gisajob.com in order to search for the jobs that are on the market at the moment. Use reed.co.uk or gojobsite.co.uk which are slightly better. At some point I may submit my own CV to gisajob.com and see what happens (although the tales of harassment from numptys at recruitment firms does give me pause for though). Whatever the results are I'll update my reviews at that point. For now I think you're better off with your local newspaper.

Please Note: The 'Ease of Registration' and 'Customer Service' are not relevant to my review. I haven't yet registered my CV (why would I with a job site that I can't find jobs on). I therefore have no idea yet what their customer service or registration is like.
 

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