Comments for ZOIS Blog

Comment on Last Week on Universal Jobmatch by Martin Sullivan

Martin Sullivan — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:09:09 +0000

Thanks for the feedback, it’s greatly appreciated. From what I’ve seen your analysis of Ilkeston seems to be repeated nationally. There’s a marked lack of checking on Universal Jobmatch (UJM) that transcends that which was found on its predecessors. Added to this is the recession generally and the desire to appear to have a lot of vacancies and you get the results you’ve observed.

Translators are quite common (both on UJM and its predecessors). They’re recruited on short-term contracts and thus there’s a perpetual need to advertise for them, even if there’s no specific real requirement. Sammy Davis Junior Impersonators are somewhat rarer. I’ll have to start doing an Interesting Job of the Week again.

Comment on Last Week on Universal Jobmatch by D Charlton

D Charlton — Sun, 05 May 2013 17:47:42 +0000

A recent search on 1st of May 2013 confined to a five-mile radius of Ilkeston returned 40 pages and 1406 job vacancies. Out of these 1406 vacancies only 26 were for full time employment requiring specific skills and experience. 684 jobs were over 4 weeks old and out of date. 50 jobs were advertised for June 2014. 25 jobs were advertised for November 2013. 495 jobs were agencies.126 jobs were well under 30 hours a week – 1 job for 2.5 hours per week. 1 job for no pay. 3 jobs were blank with no description link. 3 were temporary part time. Out of the 26 full-time jobs 1 was for a Lithuanian translator and the other a Sammy Davies Junior impersonator. 1 job was for a Notingham based vacancy in London at £1117 per hour for 2 months temping. So where actually are these jobs then????

Comment on Premature Withdrawal by UKJCP

UKJCP — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:34:47 +0000

Keep up this amazing work. Thanks @UKJCP.

Comment on The BBC Spots a Scam by JR

JR — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:03:21 +0000

Universal Jobmatch is riddled with pyramid schemes/MLM, identity thieves and scammers, and the DWP know this, but as it’s primary purpose is to enable the sanctioning of benefits, the government approve of the dubious nature of most of the ‘job’ posts.

Comment on Indeed an Alternative to Universal Jobmatch by Martin Sullivan

Martin Sullivan — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:20:35 +0000

The posting was made at a time when scraping of Universal (UJM) was forbidden. Indeed are not a small outfit and rivals of the primary contractor on UJM, Monster Worldwide. I speculated, somewhat obliquely, that they'd been allowed to get away with this by sharing usage data; there was a suggestion made at the time the UJM could track your job-hunting efforts elsewhere. The landscape of all this has changed now. Scraping is now tolerated again, and you can use FTP to get the fruits of our labours in this on a nightly basis. JobIsJobs are one of a number of sites now re-posting UJM data, either from our scrape, or one of their own. We've no particular recommendation about any of them.

Comment on Indeed an Alternative to Universal Jobmatch by David

David — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:40:53 +0000

Interesting article. Would be good to hear what you make of IDS's talk. By the way, have you come across JobisJob.co.uk? Seems to be a fairly similar alternative to Indeed.

Comment on Shorter URLs by [BLOCKED BY STBV] ZOIS Blog » Universal Jobmarch Archive Fiddles

[BLOCKED BY STBV] ZOIS Blog » Universal Jobmarch Archive Fiddles — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:08:33 +0000

[...] old ‘zois.com’ shortening for the Jobcentre Plus Mirror still works, so we can still note Dancing in [...]

Comment on New Terms and Conditions at Universal Jobmatch by Martin Sullivan

Martin Sullivan — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:18:16 +0000

Quite. The original T&C had similar amounts of Get-Outery too. It does seem to be necessary, for there have been any number of scams posted and the site is still plagued by Multi-Level-Marketing wheezes, as Twitter user @davesmith40uk reminds us. The problem seems to be a lack of eyeballs before the vacancies are posted. I've HTML'ed your posting, and correct a spelling mistake; I hope you don't mind.

Comment on New Terms and Conditions at Universal Jobmatch by San_d

San_d — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:37:00 +0000

This bit of the terms and conditions is terrifying:

§5.2 We don't accept liability for loss or damage incurred by users of the website, whether direct, indirect or consequential, whether caused by tort, breach of contract or otherwise. This includes loss of:

income or revenue
business
profits or contracts
anticipated savings
data
goodwill
tangible property
or wasted management or office time in connection with our site or in connection with the use, inability to use, or results of the use of our site, any websites linked to it and any materials posted on it. This condition shall not prevent claims for loss of or damage to your tangible property or any other claims for direct financial loss that are not excluded by any of the categories set out above.

In other words a government website says that they don't care if you get scammed by rogue employers if they posted their vacancies on the UJM.

Comment on Universal Jobmatch Investigation Tool by [BLOCKED BY STBV] ZOIS Blog » Browser to Squid, Privoxy, Tor and the World

[BLOCKED BY STBV] ZOIS Blog » Browser to Squid, Privoxy, Tor and the World — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 11:14:12 +0000

[...] Naturally all this will work with Perl’s LWP::UserAgent module, and thus The Universal Jobmatch Investigation Tool. [...]