Job site review: Job Centre Plus

Job Centre Plus - 4/5

Job Centre plus is an extension of the Job centre, a place I have to attend every two weeks. When I first went there and talked to a representative he bought up the website and stated somewhat nervously, "But you probably won't find the sort of jobs you are looking for there."

This has proved to be untrue. In fact job centre has provided me with a number of opportunties and if you are looking for immediate work and have not used it I cannot recommend it enough.

Pros:

- Wide range of jobs available. One of the traditional beliefs is that the job centre only carries menial, low paying, lowest common denominator positions. Although it does indeed have simply poorly paid hourly jobs you can also find ones with wages that far exceed my expectations for some years to come.
- To assemble its jobs it draws from a wide range of sources such as other agencies, job sites and local employer partnerships. Sometimes this requires you to leave the site to actually read about jobs or apply but it provides a good base from which to do this
- Because it is linked with the job centre you can search at the job centre on an interractive console whilst waiting to sign on. Its a small but neat thing. Also you can search and call positions whilst in the job centre, but this is something I personally don't use. I have the means to search at home.
- 5 part job interface which allows you to search keywords, postcodes and gives you a number of options at each point. This means you can look at positions they are only relevant to you...in theory.

Cons:

- The job centre has the strangest con of all the sites. If you produce a job search it will only show you 100 matches, even if 542 were found. Depending on how you decide to order the job search will determine which jobs you can see. I may be at fault in that I cannot see how to get the other 400 odd jobs but it should be simple
- I question the reliability of the job search criteria. Last week when I went to the job centre I was handed two potential jobs by the job centre employee. Both suited by needs but neither had appeared on my job search. I also had to intiially fiddle around with criteria to actually find the marketing jobs
- When I first used it I simply wrote "Marketing" in the keyword box and put my postcode. This skips several stages, which are necessary if you want to find all the jobs. If you put a keyword be sure to put which fields you want to work in as well
- At each stage you are allowed 5 options, across the whole page. Although this includes "All" it can be infuriating, for instance I am interested in marketing research and business commerce, however I am less interested in animal/fish/land or construction mangers. However, to fit all the things I need into the search I either have to select all, or miss out on several useful fields.

Conclusion

Job Centre Plus is an excellent resource for finding jobs. Tying in with your twice weekly visits to the job centre it provides a plethora of jobs from many different fields and areas. On any given job search I expect to find at least one relevant job from here, which puts it way out ahead of most of the other sites I will be reviewing.