Glassdoor adds new section for interviews

Glassdoor is an online community where people can post reviews and share salaries at companies they are working for, or have previously worked for. It was founded in 2008 to “bring transparency to the workplace so that everyone has the information needed to make better career decisions”. 

The site has three sections: salaries, reviews and interviews.  The interview section is new this month and currently has about 2000 questions from 1000 companies. 

a) Salaries

There are currently 126,000 salaries listed in the GlassDoor database.  Of these, 3,500 are in the UK and the majority of the others are in the United States.  You can search by location (eg US or international) then by all UK or UK city.  You can also search the database by occupation, industry or company.  For instance, searching on IBM in the UK brings back 95 individual salaries for 32 job titles.

b) Reviews

Search by company and location to find what present and past employees think of a company.  For each company there is an overall employer rating and a localised CEO approval statistic.  Each individual review includes pros, cons and advice to senior management.  Reviews are moderated to ensure that each one is objective and not highly biased or retaliatory.

c)  Interviews

This is the most recent section and includes search options for job title, company and a tag cloud of topics (eg ethics, behavioural).  So for instance, a search on Accenture brings up 42 interview reviews which have been posted by people who have interviewed at Accenture.  You can view all reviews or further refine the search by location.  The details of each “interview” include questions asked, techniques, duration, style and feedback.  Many people leave very detailed reviews which can be very helpful for preparation for a specific company or role.  However, it’s also useful simply to browse the questions or tags to test yourself with live questions.

Glassdoor is free to access but to view all the content you need to contribute. For salaries you simply need to share a salary (current or historic) and for interviews and reviews you need to submit a review.  These are completely anonymous and you do not need to give enough information to be personally identified.

Job search sources for the charity sector

There are about 170,000 charities in the UK employing 634,000 people in paid positions and a further 13 million volunteers*.  It’s a big sector and one which many of our clients investigate as an option. 

As with any sector, there are specialist recruiters and niche job vacancy sites serving the needs of people working in the sector. 

* Data source – National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)

We’ve pulled together a list of recruiters and vacancy sites which will be a helpful starting point for anyone looking to move within, or to, the sector.

Aquilas – Recruiters focusing on the appointment of fundraisers to the not-for-profit sector.

CF Appointments – Search and selection company focusing on the appointment of senior executives and trustees in the charity and not-for-profit sectors.

Charity Action Recruitment – Recruitment company specialising in appointments in the not-for-profit sector.

Charity Careers – Job vacancy site for the charity and fundraising sectors. Search by date posted, location (free text), type (eg contract, permanent) and keyword. Alerts by email.

Charity Connections – Recruiters specialising in the voluntary and not-for-profit sectors.

Charity Job – Job vacancy site for the charity sector. Search by keyword, category (eg HR, trustees, fundraiser), sector (eg arts, animals, disability), salary range, location (region) and job type (eg contract, permanent). Fundraising jobs have additional search categories to refine further. Alerts by email.

CR Search and Selection – Search and selection recruiters specialising in appointments for the not-for-profit sector.

Eardley Wilmot – Search and selection company focusing on fundraising appointments in the charity, arts, health, education and not-for-profit sectors.

Eden Brown – Recruiters specialising in technical appointments and the public sector. The technical division covers architecture, construction, facilities management, rail, engineering and surveying roles. The public sector division includes appointments in housing, social care, local government and charities.

Execucare – Search and selection company specialising in marketing, communications and fundraising roles in the not-for-profit sector.

Fletcher Jones – Search and selection company with expertise in consumer industries, financial services, energy, industrial, not-for-profit, professional services, public sector and technology, media and telecoms.

Flow Caritas – Recruiters specialising in the charity sector with particular focus on fundraising, marketing and PR roles.

Forum 3 Jobs – Job vacancy site for the charity sector. Search by keyword, sector (eg children, disability, elderly), role (eg education, finance, graduate, HR), status (eg full time, contract, voluntary), location (region) and date posted. Alerts by email.

GBR Search – Search company focusing on Chief Executive, Director and Senior Management level in Commerce, Industry and Not-for-Profit. The company also has a specialist practice for Security, Intelligence and Defence.

Goodmoves – Job vacancy site for the charity and voluntary sectors in Scotland, Wales and England. Search by sector (eg housing, health) or type (eg administration, finance, management). Alerts by email.

Guardian Jobs – Job vacancy site for a wide range of sectors, particularly strong for marketing, media, PR, creative, education, public sector, charity, housing, regeneration, arts, environment and health. Search by keyword, detailed industry categories (eg within a category there are further functional specialisms), location (proximity to postcode or region and county), salary range and job type (eg full time, contract). Alerts by email and RSS.

Harris Hill – Search and selection company focusing on appointments in the charity sector.

JMR Consultants – Search and selection company specialising in the appointment of board and senior roles in the not-for-profit sector.

Jobs in Charities – Job vacancy site for the charity and voluntary sectors. Search by category (eg arts, finance, housing) and location (region). Alerts by email.

Jobsgopublic – Job vacancy site for the public sector. Search by salary range, sector (eg central government, charity, police), keyword, working pattern (eg flexible, full time, part time), occupation (eg marketing, management, policy) and location (to borough level).

Kage Partnership – Recruitment company specialising in the appointment of fundraising and PR professionals into the not-for-profit sector.

Macaulay Search – Search and selection company focusing on public sector, charity and not-for-profit appointments.

Morgan Hunt Group – Search and selection company with divisions specialising in housing, finance, regeneration, education, facilities, infrastructure, health, PR, communications, marketing, charities, surveying and construction and executive positions.

Morgan Law – Search and selection company with general focus on public sector, education and not-for-profit sectors. Functional practices cover finance, HR, procurement, PR and executive.

NCVO Job Shop – Job vacancy site for the charity sector run for the NCVO by Third Sector Jobs. Search by sector (eg animal, children, faith, international), function (eg fundraising, marketing, policy), salary band and location (region). Alerts by email and RSS.

People Unlimited – Recruitment company specialising in appointments in the not-for-profit, charity, housing, arts, education and public sectors.

ProspectUs – Search and selection company specialising in appointments in the not-for-profit sector.

Public Jobs Direct – Job vacancy site for the public sector. Search by sector (eg central government, charities, defence, education), keyword, type (permanent, contract, flexible), salary (banding) and location (region and county). Alerts by email, RSS and SMS.

Rockpools – Public sector search and selection specialists. Divisions for central government, education, health, local government, not-for-profit, regeneration, housing and sports.

The Times Jobs – Job vacancy site covering all sectors but particularly strong for public sector, administration, education, legal, sales and marketing, engineering, construction and manufacturing and senior-level roles. Search by keyword, industry (eg consultancy, education, energy), location (region and county) and salary band. Each industry also has detailed sub categories. Alerts by email and RSS.

Third Sector – Job vacancy site for the charity sector. Search by sector (eg animal, children, faith, international), function (eg fundraising, marketing, policy), salary band and location (region). Alerts by email and RSS.

TPP - Recruitment company with divisions covering wide range of sectors including not-for-profit, HR and office support, medical and healthcare, facilities management, education, private banking, fund management, trading and city operations.

Further information

We’ve also put this information on to the Career Workshop website and you can also download the information in a user-friendly PDF format from this page.

Registered users of our Online Transitions Centre can download the full Charity recruiters lists with contact details from the site.  These lists are also available to purchase to non-users in either PDF or Excel format.

TwitterJobSearch launched by Workhound

A few weeks ago I referred to the directory of job feeds on Twitter that Workhound had launched … and the new search tools that they were promising.  One of those tools was launched yesterday – the TwitterJobSearch.

I have been looking forward to this.  For a while I have been subscribing to a few job feeds via Twitter to get an idea of the “client experience”.  I have to say, it’s not great.  Almost the Twitter equivalent of spam.  Certainly I have been worried about missing other relevant things due to the volume from certain recruiters and job boards.  So with this in mind, I am interested to know about tools being developed that will enable my clients to search these feeds and extract the jobs that are relevant to them via a third party search function. 

I was also wondering how it was going to be possible to pull together a decent search function on 140 character tweets which frequently do not list key information such as location, salary etc and have no indexing.  I assumed this would be essentially a keyword search.  It isn’t, apparently.  It is a contextual search.  I did a few test searches to test this out and it clearly isn’t just keyword searching.  I presume they are searching on the directory of job feeds and there is some proprietary indexing in place.  When I tested, the database had 28,167 jobs from the last seven days.

Searching

The home page has a simple search box – What do you want to do?  (nice turn on the Twitter tagline of What are you doing?) – and you simply type a few keywords in to the box.  It’s very much in the searching style of the job search engines.  I threw in “HR manager in Manchester”.  This found me 795 jobs – 30 from today, 133 from yesterday and 575 from the rest of the week (the figure for today is low because I am searching at 7am, clearly that will be much higher later).   Not quite sure why those figures don’t add up to 795 though.

Results

Results are presented back in a list, very much like looking at your Twitter home page.  In addition to the original tweet and profile picture you get details of when the tweet was added, a link to view the ad on the recruiter’s website, an option to retweet and a link to follow the recruiter.  The list was presented back in non-chronological order, with some jobs from a week ago whilst other more recent ones were further down.  On closer inspection, I think this is because there is some basic indexing and weighting given to the results – for instance the top two results, although not in Manchester, were in the North West and Beverley.  However there were also other non-HR roles from Manchester towards the top of the list – understandable though in a simple keyword OR search.

So what were the results actually like.  Not bad!  I tried a “HR manager in West London search” and there were two really relevant roles at the top of the search.  This was followed by quite a few irrelevant hits for paralegals, sales managers and marketing roles.  Then it went back into HR and training.

Refining and saving your results

From your results page you can refine your results by date (today, yesterday, older), job title, skills and job type (eg permanent, full time, temporary etc).  Whilst they are still in the beta version, I wouldn’t recommend refining by anything other than date as I got some strange results.  For instance, near the top of my search results was an Interim HR role, but when I refined by contract the job vanished from my list.  And of course in an ideal world, the skills and job titles would be contextual to the keywords I had entered into my search.  But now I’m being picky.

You can save your search and have the results in an RSS feed, although I could only get the feed working when viewing the site in Firefox, not in IE.

Issues

I did find in another search that there were a lot of dubious sounding, home-based-great-income-opportunity type roles coming up but these were more of a problem when searching on certain job functions (eg accountancy was particularly bad).  I followed the link to one Twitter account to see if they were a reputable recruiter or job board and it did seem that they were, albeit with a stream of such roles posted last weekend. 

I only found two non-job tweets in the search results, and there is an option on the right to “de-tweet this job”.  This then gives you further options to delete the tweet based on “it’s not for me” or “it’s not a job”.  Again, not sure how these work and whether the former helps in any way to inform your own preferences and results or how the latter is protected from misuse or competitive sabotage.

The other thing to remember when using TwitterJobSearch, and indeed Twitter itself is to just exercise some caution when clicking on the links.  All are abbreviated with services such as tinyurl so actually you have no idea where you are going through to.

Verdict at this stage

All in all, I am impressed with where Workhound have got to with TwitterJobSearch.  It’s a difficult area to tackle and I think, whilst there’s obviously areas for improvement which I bet they are already working on, they have made a very good job with this beta version.  I will bring it to the attention of clients who are actively job searching and using social media and look forward to seeing how the product refines and develops over the coming months.

Directory of Twitter Job Feeds on Workhound

The job search engine Workhound has created a directory of job feeds and recruiters who are active on Twitter.

The directory is a temporary solution whilst Workhound are working on some new products to assimilate recruitment data from social media sources.  It is arranged simply by category (function or sector) and contains over 400 feeds, unsuprisingly most of these are in IT, media and marketing.

Since some job feeds are spammy, Workhound have implemented criteria which feeds must meet to be included in the directory – less than one post per hour and each tweet must contain relevant information such as job title, location, salary, URL and useful #tags.

The directory is on the Workhound website.  Looking forward to seeing their new social media search tools when they’re launched.

Job search engine Workcircle launches sector sites

Job search engine (aggregator) Workcircle has launched 11 new sector-specific vacancy sites under their ABC sister brand.

The sector sites contain the relevant advertisements for that sector from the main Workcircle site plus they also contain direct (ie extra) vacancies from employers or recruiters. 

The new sites cover IT, marketing, sales, engineering, catering, finance, admin, legal, healthcare, retail and construction.

However, don’t forget to bear in mind the caution we advised when using job search engines.  Refer back to our job search engine guide for more information (which we have now updated with this development).  The sites have all been added to the function and industry pages in our Online Transitions Centre.

Naturejobs relaunches website

The scientific jobs website Naturejobs has relaunched today with a new look and enhanced resources and functionality. 

Naturejobs is the largest vacancy site for scientific jobs and currently has over 5,000 vacancies posted.   There is a straightforward browse search on the home page (by title, region, discipline and employer) or you can use the advanced search which enables boolean and keyword searching.  Alerts are available by email or via RSS feed.

The site also contains additional resources for job seekers such as videos, podcasts, news and comment from the Nature journal relating to science careers and a list of international science careers fairs.  Also new to the site is a Career Toolkit which includes resources and tools for researching science careers, for example an ask the expert section and guidance on presentation skills, mentoring, interviewing, networking and salaries.