A further update on one person’s experience using Universal Jobmatch hosted here anonymously…

In early March this year I was very suddenly made redundant (i.e with 2 days notice), and cast into the gentle arms of the benefits system for the first time in my life. As my employer had entered administration this meant that their financial liabilities had transferred to the State, and to get the statutory redundancy and notice pay that I was owed I needed to register as a Jobseeker. Being a Jobseeker also meant that I would get Jobseekers Allowance: an amount so small that if I had to live on it (rather than doing as I did and using my emergency savings) would rapidly have seen me becoming homeless due to unpayable debts. I was shocked at how little support there was for Jobseekers, both in the Job Centres, and through the Government online jobs portal Universal Jobmatch.

During this period of unemployment, I wrote both an initial post and also a follow up post on this blog, which detailed the many inadequacies that I had encountered when first using Universal Jobmatch. I described its extreme slowness; its inability to understand localities smaller than a whole country; it being incapable of refining job alert results to only the required sector or location; and the jobs advertised on it being outdated, spam or potentially illegal. The many comments following the initial post have outlined the various problems that other Jobseekers are also having using it, many of which are leading to unfair sanctions and hardships for those individuals.

We’re now 7 months on from those original posts, which feels like a long enough time to have given the UJ site a full test. So, what have my experiences with it been in that time, and did it proven to be a useful job-hunting tool in the end?

To begin with, a quick update since my initial tests – I gained new employment in mid-May, but the job was utterly awful*, so I returned to job searching, working full-time in the day and spending 2-3 hours every night looking for and applying to vacancies. I have applied for 100 skilled professional posts since March 2013 (although I have taken a temporary break over the past month), and I have multiple email alerts and RSS feeds set up to ensure that I am able to find relevant vacancies as soon as they become available. I think it’s safe to say that I am very aware of what potential roles there are being advertised in my sector and location.

In the 7 months since I originally registered with UJ, I have not logged in to the UJ system. Not once. There was no need for me to do so, because I had set up email alerts for my areas of experience/skills which would send relevant vacancies direct to my inbox. This is the same method of disseminating information that commercial job sites and professional recruitment agencies use. However, reading the comments on my first post it appears that if I was currently registered as a Jobseeker, not logging in at some level of frequency would lead to sanctions and loss of Jobseekers Allowance for a period. Why is the action of logging in to a site seen as more important than the action of productively looking for jobs, wherever they may be? Luckily, as I was in full-time employment after May I was not subject to monitoring by a Jobseekers advisor of my use of the site, but I find this a worrying approach for current claimants.

OK then, even without logging in, has Universal Jobmatch done what it’s allegedly designed to do, and been successful at connecting me with vacancies? During the last 7 months of receiving daily email alerts sent by the system, there have been approximately 12 jobs sent that are relevant for my stated skills areas, and which I could apply for with a realistic prospect of actually being considered for the role. On clicking through to view the adverts on UJ, all of those jobs were actually previously advertised on one or more of the job sites that I had alerts set up for, and all of them were on those sites long before they were send from UJ. As an added bonus, some of those jobs were being advertised for the first time on UJ after their closing date had passed. As most vacancies have an application period that’s open for at least 2 weeks, if not a month, I cannot understand what UJ is doing so wrong that it’s displaying these vacancies many weeks after they were initially advertised. This delay in notifying users of available roles is minimising the time which people have to apply, and reducing their chances of success…or removing them entirely if they were relying on UJ to identify current vacancies for them. If I had been relying solely on UJ for my job search, I would have missed the rare opportunities that arise to apply for professional posts in my sector.

Of course, there’s also the additional problem of vacancies being advertised without the information that allows you to actually apply for them. For example, one advert recently stated “To apply and to access more information relating to the vacancy scroll down to Job Packs and click on the link.” But there was no Job Pack area on the page, and no link to apply via on the page, purely because this is a direct lift from the employer’s website, with no check if it was actually coherent and useable when placed on UJ. The advert on UJ gives an individual’s email address under the “application methods” section, but the body of text gives a different, corporate email address to contact to request application forms: this is confusing. On the employers website there are indeed Job Packs, and further information about the vacancy on the page, again showing the corporate email address and with no mention of the person with the individual’s email address. I had to locate that recruitment website and vacancy information for myself, using my own, previously gained knowledge of how that specific employer advertises vacancies, and my belief that there would be Job Packs available on their site for immediate download. A site which advertises vacancies which aren’t actually available unless you do your own search outside it, or which advertises closed vacancies is not being successful in its core requirement of enabling Jobseekers to apply for jobs.

Another aspect of those UJ email alerts that I set up is the sheer volume of completely inappropriate job adverts that I’m being sent, rather than notifications of relevant roles being advertised. When my UJ profile has been created with settings meaning it should only send information on roles within 25 miles of my location, in Library and Information Science or Social Media, the massive amounts of irrelevant vacancies I get emailed to me is ridiculous: MOT tester. Sous chef. Mobile care assistant. Pensions consultant. Personal carer. Recruiter. Tax manager. Dodgy “work from home” roles. Engineer. Customer service adviser. Parts inspector for the oil industry. Jobs 50 miles away. Jobs 100 miles away. Jobs in Germany and Spain.

The UJ emails contain between 5-12 vacancies per email, every day. As I’ve been registered for around 230 days, this means that if I average the irrelevant alerts to be coming in at the rate of 8 a day, I’ve had a minimum of 1840 entirely useless vacancies identified and sent to me so far. As stated above, approximately 12 of those roles were actually ones I’d signed up to be alerted about, which means that only around 1 in 153 vacancies emailed to me by UJ may actually be one I’d requested. That’s not an inspiring statistic, especially in comparison to the accurate and targeted alerts I get from “proper” job websites like indeed.co.uk.

Luckily, I am actually an experienced information specialist. I have the skills that enable me to quickly sift through information and discard irrelevant material, yet the fact that I am forced to do this daily with UJ email alerts is hugely frustrating. Why can the system not actually use the settings I established? The ability to restrict job searches to location, and sector is one of the most basic functions this site should be able to perform, and which all commercial job search sites provide, yet it simply cannot do it. I am being bombarded with hundreds of useless emails, which I must sift for any hidden, relevant jobs. I am being sent notifications of vacancies after the application deadline has passed. I am gaining nothing of use from this website, and it has played absolutely no part in the fact that I have been able to find and apply for so many jobs over the last 7 months. To me, it is of no practical use at all.

Yet I am lucky. All of this is only an inconvenience for me: I currently have employment so I’m not required to use UJ, I can use other websites to monitor vacancies, I have reliable internet access, and I have the skills to sift through those emails for the occasional useful bits. I don’t need to use the site to apply directly for jobs to prove that I’m actively trying to find employment. What if I didn’t have internet access? What if I was being forced to travel every day, just to get internet access, to prove that I had logged in to a system that doesn’t even hold any jobs I can apply for, and doesn’t even send out my CV to employers when I do use it to apply for a role? What if I didn’t have the IT skills to use a computer, the knowledge of where to look online for reliable job adverts, or a literacy level that meant I could skim those emailed job titles and know not to waste my time, as they weren’t the jobs I was looking for? What if I didn’t have the experience to know that I could do some research and go directly to the source site for adverts to get immediate access to required application forms, rather than have to request that they be emailed to me, and lose valuable time that could be spent filling out the application? What if I have a visual impairment and have problems using online resources? None of these reasons constitute an attempt to avoid looking for employment, yet due to the system being incompetently implemented, they are being regarded as such, and Jobseekers are being sanctioned and punished as a result.

What would my advice be if you were “encouraged” to use Universal Jobmatch? Refuse. The system is hopelessly broken, yet as shown by the comments on my previous posts, the only ones who are suffering are not the people who designed an unusable system, but the often vulnerable people who are forced to use it. This is not an example of a core government service being provided using a system which is fair and equitable. This is a badly designed, badly implemented and completely unsupported shambles of a website. Frankly, the designers and those faceless government bodies who approved it and are forcing vulnerable claimants to use it should have their membership cards for the human race revoked.

Or even better – force THEM to have to use it in order to claim their salaries.

*No matter how awful a job is (and in this case it involved mismanagement and bullying) you cannot leave a role, as this is classed as making yourself voluntarily unemployed. That means you’re not entitled to Jobseekers Allowance. It also means that individuals are forced to stay in work situations so bad that it affects their mental and physical health.