More than 100,000 unique vacancies are being posted at any given time on the Jobcentre Plus Job Bank website under a two-year-old pilot programme in which recruitment agencies post and manage their own job announcements, says the Government employment service’s chief executive.

Currently, 166 approved advertisers are using the site - the UK’s most visited job site - and between 30 and 40 advertisers are uploading vacancies on a weekly basis, Lesley Strathie told Recruiter in an exclusive interview. Private recruitment agencies account for 64% of the users, job boards 27% and employers 9%. However, 75% of the Job Warehouse vacancies are posted by commercial job boards. “We’re building the employer and the agency ends of it at the moment,” Strathie said. “What we have to do is dovetail that with our own labour market system which supports all of our advisers who are helping people into work. That dovetailing happens in October.” Job Warehouse is a controlled business trial to understand the customer appetite for the service and to make improvements to the technology, based on live running experience and feedback from advertisers and jobseekers. System improvements are planned for next month and in April 2007. Planning for a national roll-out is underway. Strathie is keen to stress the significance of working in partnership with recruitment agencies. “We’re all in the business of trying to match the needs of the employer with the availability of suitable people to match that vacancy. We want to work with them in the spirit of genuine partnership, to meet the needs of employers, but also to meet the needs of our customers, the jobseekers,” she says. However, both sides must overcome what Strathie calls “the mythology” surrounding each’s perception of how the other operates. Recruiters must lose the notion that Jobcentre Plus is competing with them for business. The mythology surrounding recruitment agencies suggests that unscrupulous operators are pervasive throughout the industry. “I have no evidence of that but what I do know is the huge mythology around it absolutely needs to be exploded,” she says. One such myth, she says, is that agencies advertise non-existent vacancies to “build up their caseloads”. On the other hand, Strathie’s conversations with recruiters suggest they believe that Jobcentre Plus does not offer the kinds of candidates that employers want. Nevertheless, “we have lots of evidence from our work over the past few years that we can make a real difference to each other’s business,” she says. “We need to build on what we’ve done, all of us.”