During September and October 2008, I was an active user of the Experteer.com premium subscription and this is my honest feedback and review on their services.
DISCLAIMER: I’m not affiliated in any way to any recruiting company, job portal, HR firm or Headhunter. The thoughts shared here are just from my personal experience. Any recommendation is based just on my opinion and nothing else.
The web / Usability… OK
In general I would have to say that I’m satisfied with the usability of the site. Filling the forms and entering the data of your profile is easy and intuitive. The advanced search criterion and additional filtering capabilities are indeed very cool. The web lets you refine search results by salary, km away from your base city, Country and a scoring system. It does not have as many features and possibilities like Monster, but I would say It’s OK.
Exposure to headhunters… Really?
One of the things they advertise is that Experteer is the place where all headhunters in Europe come to look for candidates… Well, this might be true or not, but the only thing I can tell you is what happened to my profile: It was viewed 1 (yes, one) time by a headhunter during the 2 months of I was subscribed to their service. Just to clarify, I had 100% of my profile completed (so there was no excuse to exclude me or down-rank me because my profile was incomplete). If there is something they need to work on, I would say is this point: they need to get more recruiters/headhunters to use their service.
Access to “hidden” offers…NO
One important thing is that they do not have access (at least in my experience) to exclusive or offline job opportunities; in other words, everything you will be able to find on Experteer is already online. This is an important clarification because many specialized headhunters, and more specifically in the 60.000EUR+ job market, do have positions that are either exclusive for them or are not being advertised.
Access to real 60.000EUR+ job offers?… YES
This is indeed one of the few but important positive things I got out of their service: They do have a broad, updated and real base of job offers offering salaries 60.000EUR+; not like other online recruiters. Of course you will find eventually some broken links or offers that appear in search results, but have expired, but I would say this happened in a small percentage of time. A rough estimation would be that 90%-95% of the offers that appear on their search results are real, haven’t expired and are indeed 60.000EUR+ positions
As a conclusion, I would say that if you have a lot of time to research (maybe if you’re unemployed), it may not make sense to pay for the premium subscription given that most of what you’ll find you could find it yourself. On the other hand, if you don’t have much time or perhaps are still employed, you might not get exclusive or offers but you can save some time researching… and if you’re earning more than 60.000EUR per year, it may worth a try for 25EUR a month.