WikiJob: A Profile

WikiJob.co.uk is a British website aimed at students and graduates seeking to find out more information on career choices, employers, and recruitment processes.

We are the first candidate focused graduate recruitment website and the largest job search community on the Internet.

As the name suggests, WikiJob has a wiki-based area, where anyone can choose to create pages detailing any company’s recruitment details and processes (i.e. this page for PwC). There are also wiki pages devoted to all the different types of assessment which companies use in selecting people for their graduate programme. On one page, describing competency based interviews, a favourite of graduate recruiters, there is a very informative video by one of WikiJob’s co-founders.

WikiJob’s crowning glory, however, is its forums. Here anyone (once registered for free) can ask questions about pretty much anything. From what it is like to work for Company X through to help in preparing for Company Y’s assessment centres. The most active part of the site is naturally the forums, and the most active industries are accounting/professional service firms and financial services, probably reflecting fairly accurately the distribution of graduate jobs in the marketplace.

If I was reading about such a website, the first thing I would think is that once people have been successful and been offered a job they will just leave and never come back. While partly true I am sure, there are many people who are willing to give back to their community of fellow students and graduates, ensuring that WikiJob has become a valuable source of information for anyone applying for graduate schemes in the UK.

Having been through many of the graduate recruitment processes over the last year and finally been successful, I have been devoting some time each week to answering other people’s questions, and it has actually been quite rewarding to see that people I gave answers to have received job offers!

In October 2008 WikiJob received over 150,000 visits and approximately 850,000 page impressions.

Our users consist of students, university graduates, graduate job seekers and current graduate employees at city firms. We are also regularly visited and edited by careers advisers and graduate recruiters from many major firms.

Considering there is little, if any, promotion of WikiJob the above figures are quite impressive, and demonstrates the power of word-of-mouth. In the About pages there are some great little videos describing WikiJob to Companies and Candidates.

WikiJob also provide some paid-for services which help to keep the website running; these include interview coaching, application form reviewing, CV and covering letter writing etc.

So check out WikiJob.co.uk which is the definitive place to get answers to your questions on any aspect of graduate recruitment.

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In a later post I will try and look at WikiJob as a community of practice, and as knowledge sharing in action.