Universal Jobmatch

» see jobsearch.direct.gov.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Most dead websites in this collection were things people chose. Universal Jobmatch was a website the British state could require you to use. From 1 March 2013 a Jobcentre Plus adviser could direct a Jobseeker's Allowance claimant to create an account, and failing to comply carried sanctions that ran up to three years. Advisers also asked for access to claimant accounts so they could check the searching was really happening.

It went live on 19 November 2012, built and operated by Monster Worldwide for the Department for Work and Pensions. It swallowed a row of older systems in one go, including Employer Direct and the Jobcentre Plus jobs and skills search. By February 2013 it reported two million registered users and more than six million searches a day, which made it one of the largest job boards in the country by raw volume.

The procurement was messy before the site even opened. A Freedom of Information request later established that Monster had ranked last on value and second from bottom on evaluation scoring in the first tender. After the process was re-run, the government paid £950,000 in compensation to Methods Consulting and Jobsite UK, who should have won.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ mandatory ~

I have never claimed a benefit in Britain and have no business pretending to know what that felt like. The part I can read from here is the design problem, which is what happens to a website's incentives when its users are not there voluntarily. A job board that people visit because they want work has to be useful to keep them. A job board people visit because an adviser wrote it down only has to record that they turned up.

The fake vacancy problem followed from that. Employers could post with very little friction, and the site filled up with duplicate listings sitting next to adverts that existed only to harvest personal data. Channel 4 News ran a segment in December 2012, barely a month after launch, on jobseekers being targeted for financial fraud through the site. Official advice was that users should "never ever give out things like scanned passports, national insurance numbers or bank account details," which is sound guidance and an odd thing to need on a government service. By March 2014 the Guardian had leaked DWP documents proposing the site be scrapped over fake and repeated adverts, and a separate exercise put the number of fake jobs investigated at around 11,000.

~ the day it died ~

Monster's contract ended in March 2017, and the site carried on for another fourteen months after its builder had gone. On 26 April 2018 a notice went up on the home page announcing a replacement. Find a job, built with Adzuna, launched on 14 May 2018.

Accounts did not transfer. Users were told to save anything they wanted to keep, including CVs and application histories, by 17 June 2018. GOV.UK posted the confirmation at 10:20 on the morning of 18 June: "Universal Jobmatch has now closed and all accounts will no longer be accessible." Five and a half years of saved cover letters went with it, belonging to people who had mostly been told to write them there.

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