Loopo is a fairly small operation, at least in global terms, so we always welcome efficient low cost ways to recruit new employees. Years ago we used to try sites like Monster and CW Jobs, but frankly they’re expensive and all we tended to see was non geographically relevant candidates and offshore outsourcing companies taking the scattergun approach. To put this into perspective, I was recently talking to a manager at a national charity, who uses Reed’s online recruitment service. This allows you to see how many pending job applications there are per candidate, and he tells me it is not unheard of for candidates to make over 400 applications simultaneously. Clearly this is a nonsense in terms of fielding quality candidates, so why bother?

Instead, we found that gumtree.com yielded a higher quality candidate, in large numbers, and at very low cost (around £25 incl. VAT, for a 60 day advert). More recently though,we’ve been trying the excellent Resumator, which not only offers a useful online interface, but also has a brilliant integration device for your own company site (And it’s free to advertise a single job). A single line of javascript dynamically shows all open vacancies on your company’s web page. This is genius and instantly makes a small company’s recruitment offering look about 10 times more professional - you can even define custom form fields which the candidate must fill in, as well as the usual upload CV options.

So, we decided to run our recent recruitment using both Resumator and gumtree, then we found that gumtree now have an online organisation product for job applications. They’re calling it “Response Manager” but it is actually App Vault under the hood. It costs £15 extra, on top of the £25. I wasn’t familiar with this product and I have to say it has not been a good experience whatsoever. Not only is the online interface typically extremely slow to respond, it also seems riddled with bugs.

I realised only after the first CV came through via email, that applicants were being asked a long and irrelevant set of questions, which I had been given no chance to view or edit before the vacancy went live (How about a confirmation email and login details gumtree?!). So I found myself frantically trying to prune the questions and ask some more sensible ones instead - except that AppVault (AKA Response Manager) wouldn’t reliably delete anything, and often my edits went into cyberspace (where no one can hear you scream - not even a recruitment consultant). 30 frustrating minutes later, I’d just about honed the questions into some sort of shape - but not before six candidates had applied.

A few days later, as I was flicking through CVs and reorganising them into folders, I frequently got thrown out to a default error page and told that my request had been denied as my internet speed was too slow! Not bad considering I’m on a corporate 8Mb connection. Also, the fact that the candidate’s uploaded documents have to be downloaded and can’t be viewed onscreen, is a real pain. What makes matters worse is that they are all delivered as a uniformly named download file “binaryupload.doc/docx/pdf”, meaning it’s more fiddly to view several documents in sucession as you have to keep renaming or closing documents. Whoever thought up this usabilty challenged nightmare really should take a look at Resumator’s beautiful online PDF/Word reader, Scribd, which looks like it might be from the same stable.

Still, the worst was yet to come - as we’d had getting on for 100 applications, we decided to pull the advert from gumtree. With no warning, this has now removed our access to the candidate’s application form responses and CVs! So all the hard work I did to sort them into folders (in “Response Manager”) has been lost. A panic email to the supplied support email has produced no reply. An official complaint to Gumtree, and a dispute opened with Paypal are also apparently not important enough for Gumtree to process - yet.

So, my advice to any budding companies and recruiters - stay clear of Gumtree’s Response Manager. It’s hopeless (or will be until they improve it). Head for the Resumator instead - and I must tip my hat to Dan at Pitchup for recommending it to me.

We’re on the look out for a wonderful IT support analyst to join the friendly team at Loopo.

We require a bright, breezy individual to manage our support operations and handle 1st/2nd line support for our online recruitment/application portals and other web applications. You will be exceptionally IT literate, with excellent communication skills and an ability to ruffle furrowed brows and generally keep a large number of balls in the air.

You will preferably have some experience in an IT support environment. Experience and knowledge of web hosting environments and web development is desirable.Read more about it here and send us your CV if you think you’d like to part of Loopo’s future.