Job Hunting in UK Higher Education II: Searching Job Hunting Websites

In order to find vacancies, I used 14 different websites, which can be divided into the following types:

• web sites covering the whole of the UK concentrating on the academic sector (e.g. THES, jobs.ac.uk)
• web sites covering the whole of the UK concentrating on IT posts (e.g. the British Computer Society)
• web sites listing vacancies at a particular university or organisation of particular interest (basically, those nearest my home plus JISC, UKOLN, and JANET)

I'm going to try to establish the features I would like to see in a jobs website, by comparing two of the first type: the Times Higher, and jobs.ac.uk. Both contain a wide selection of UK higher education vacancies, along with some other positions in other sectors and abroad. According to the two sites, the THES has 662 vacancies listed, and jobs.ac.uk has 4143. The principal reasons for the difference are that vacancies are listed on jobs.ac.uk until the closing date for application, while the THES lists them for four weeks only; the THES is more than twice as expensive; and (as a result) jobs.ac.uk includes a much larger number of Ph.D. studentships. Despite the large difference in numbers, many vacancies are in fact advertised in both websites.

Creating a Search

Most users are likely to want to create a search to pull out the vacancies which match their requirements in a new post. Such searches are likely to be quite complex, encompassing such requirements as location and minimum salary, as well as the more complex job type requirements (including "subject area" requirements such as "mathematics", broad classifications such as "academic related", and the basic responsibilities of the post, such as "manager", "technician" - at least three independent search term types.

Let us attempt to create a search for full time posts in the Midlands or South East of England, in computer science, either a lecturer or a senior lecturer.

On the THES site, such a search is created through the "Advanced search" interface.Other then entering keywords, it is only possible to search by "location" "contract terms", "roles", and "contract type". Some of these filters are in themselves not very helpful. For example, the location has to be all, a continent, or the UK, none of which restrict the search as much as we want. It is only possible to choose one role, out of  a very long list (even if some choices are groups, such as "Lecturers, Fellows and Tutors", which means that a choice which spans two groups as the one we are trying to carry out is not possible, and choosing the group which seems closest will also list studentships. For contract type, as well as the obvious full or part time choices, it is also possible to select "All contract types" and "Full or Part time", and it is not obvious what the difference between these two choices will be. The listing is like this because vacancies can be advertised as "full time", "part time" or "full or part time", and selecting the first or second of these will not list vacancies of the third type despite this being clearly desirable. There are no pre-set subject area fields, so the the keywords need to be used here. It appears from a little experimentation that a stemming algorithm is used, so that "computing" also finds "computational", "computer", etc. Another positive aspect is that although many of the advertisements in the THES have generic titles ("Lecturer", "Research Assistant", etc. -  often because multiple posts in several academic subjects are advertised together) and the keyword search picks up the words in the text of the advertisement as well as the title.

So the search closest to what we want is going to be to have the keyword "computing", the location UK, permanent contract terms, the role group "Lecturers, Fellows and Tutors", and the contract type full time: a search which is fairly likely to miss many of the vacancies we might actually be interested in. Indeed, this search returns 0 results (on 9 April 2010). In my job search, I found the THES search interface infuriating, and always ended up browsing through all the adverts by role.

On jobs.ac.uk, the advanced search form is accessed by clicking on one of the categories on the front page. This is rather counter-intuitive, as these categories look as though they should take the reader directly to browse through all the vacancies in that section (as in fact the A-Z of employers at the bottom of the page does, just to add to the potential confusion).

The advanced search screen has rather different categories from those on THES, with a lot more options in most categories and the possibility of choosing more than one where this makes sense. The subcategories are tailored to the chosen category, also a sensible method to do this (and obviously the reason why the advanced search form appears after the choice of a category).

Of our criteria, it is not possible to filter full time roles from this form, and the lecturer or senior lecturer requirement is reasonably sensibly fudged by choosing an Academic or Research role in a UK and Irish HE institution. This search returns 8 results, of which one is actually a lectureship vacancy; the remainder are research fellow or research associate posts.

In this first test, neither site proves perfect, but jobs.ac.uk is far better. For the kind of job hunt I was carrying out, the search on THES is virtually useless.

Browsing / Reviewing search results

An alternative method for finding vacancies of interest is to browse through the whole collection of advertisements, filtering them by hand. This is actually not much slower than searching, particularly as a vague search can be used to rule out some posts which are definitely not going to be of interest. It is a technique particularly useful for the job search I was carrying out, as I was basically looking for an interesting sounding post not too far away from London which pays not too much less than I earn now. The posts I applied for included lectureships, research fellowships and middle management positions.

With the THES, the most useful category for me to use for searching was to restrict to vacancies with location UK. This gives a large number of vacancies (359 on 10 April 2010) in batches of 10, sorted in order of addition to the website, most recent first. For each post, a paragraph of information is given which makes it possible to reject many of the vacancies almost immediately. The amount of information given varies; in the screenshot, we see some of the most recent adverts, which have about fifty words of information, easily enough that it should be possible to work out whether to instantly discard the post from consideration. But slightly older posts include less information, only about ten words from the first paragraph of the advertisement, which may not be enough to decide whether the vacancy is of interest. This means that it is important for advertisers to think carefully about how their vacancy will be displayed, so that the first sentence of the text is about the position(s) and not merely a puff for the institution - as is in fact the case in the text for main post in the screenshot. Another problem has also been fixed. The searches I carried out in November timed out quickly (in a matter of a few minutes), which meant that every so often it was necessary to recreate the search and navigate through back to the page which was being viewed.

There are two remaining issues with the list. First, the summary results do not give the date at which the advert was first placed, which means that on repeat visits the browser needs to try to guess which adverts have already been seen. This information does not appear in the detailed information for each post, either. A star is placed by those posts which are "New this week" - but it is not made clear when the week actually starts (it is in fact on the day when the weekly paper edition of the THES appears). Second, it is not possible to choose to sort the list in any other way, say by salary, and this might be useful to many potential applicants.

With jobs.ac.uk, the browser has a lot more options to control how the list of results is displayed. Not only is is possible to sort by four different criteria, the number of results displayed can be changed, and the search which produced the results can be modified. Less detail is given for each result, but the titles for advertisements on jobs.ac.uk tend to be more informative so this is actually less of a problem than on THES.

The comparison here is much closer, but jobs.ac.uk comes out just ahead for ease of browsing.

Saving Searches / Email notifications

Having constructed a complex search once, users don't want to recreate it every time they access a site. So an important aspect of a job hunting site of any size is that it should be possible to save searches in some way, after registration, and/or to organise for new search results to be sent to you regularly - and then easily stopped, once the job hunt is over.

On jobs.ac.uk there is a button on a search results page, "Email me jobs like these".  When this is clicked, the user sees a simple registration page and can from there set the search results to be emailed weekly, or when new matching vacancies appear. To stop the search, the user logs in on the website, and follows the link to the unsubscribe form near the bottom of the page - not ticking the "suspend email". (As an aside, making changes to anything on the profile page and submitting makes the application assume that the user also wants to change their password, so in order to do anything, the password needs to be entered in the "new password" box - an irritating little design flaw.) An unsubscriber needs to complete a form, to explain why: obviously a useful tool for the managers of the website.