Universal Jobmatch Wins Worst Website Award

Reblogged from The Void:

In yet more humiliation for Iain Duncan Smith’s bungled welfare reforms, Universal Jobmatch was judged the worst online jobs website at a recent industry awards ceremony.

The government job-seeking website, which has been plagued by spam, scams and spoof vacancies, won the ‘Wooden Nora’ at last week’s National Online Recruitment Awards.  730 online recruitment websites were considered for awards with Universal Jobmatch being judged the worst.  According to The Guardian’s Diary the website was described as a “mongrel of a recruitment website” that “commits almost every online recruitment crime, and then some.”

Universal Jobmatch was designed at huge cost – believed to be approaching almost £20 million.  Despite this the site has been plagued by technical problems as well as becoming home to thousands of flaky self-employment schemes, pyramid scams and fake job adverts used to harvest CVs and even commit identity theft.  It is hard to understand how Monster, the company paid to produce the website, could have produced something so atrocious that it is a laughing stock amongst recruitment professionals.

The mystery of this sheer incompetence deepens with the news that Monster themselves won an award for the best online recruitment website at last week’s awards.  It’s almost as if they took the money and deliberately bungled Universal Jobmatch to ensure there would be no effective competition to their main business from the DWP.

*This advice for claimants mandated to register for Universal Jobmatch has not changed.  Whilst you can be issued with a Jobseeker’s Direction forcing you to sign up to and use the site, you do not have to tick the box giving Jobcentre staff access to snoop on your job search.  You should also unticked the box – ticked by default – which gives your permission to receive DWP emails.  You can not be forced to use Universal Jobmatch on your home computer, or anywhere but inside the Jobcentre.