ASA Adjudication on Jobsite UK (Worldwide) Ltd

Ad

A TV ad for a recruitment website. The voice-overs stated "Upload your CV to Jobsite and we'll search through an average of 9,000 new jobs every day to find you the right one. Jobsite, our job is searching for your job".

Issue

Two viewers challenged whether the claim "we'll search through an average of 9,000 new jobs every day" was misleading and could be substantiated.

BCAP TV Code

Response

Jobsite UK (Worldwide) Ltd (Jobsite) said they tracked the number of new vacancies posted on their site monthly and had calculated an average based on the previous 16 months; the daily average of 9,075 was then calculated based on the number of working days in most months.  They had chosen to use working days because that was relevant to the subject matter and had based their calculations on the previous 16 months because it was representative of their annual traffic since they had begun gathering that data.  

They tracked the new postings using their internal website and ensured each vacancy was only "counted" once, for the month in which it was originally created, using a date stamp against when it was posted.  They sent a sample of the postings for two days and said any jobs that appeared to be replicated, because they had the same title, might relate to different roles in different parts of the country.  Otherwise they might have been placed by the same recruitment company but be relevant to different employers, who were their clients.  It was highly unlikely that the same advertiser would place more than one advert for the same role because they were charged per ad.  If the advertisers wished to renew an ad, the same reference number was used to ensure that ad was excluded from future "new job counts".  They said the website was available at all times.  

Clearcast said they had advised Jobsite that the ad should state that the figure was an average and it should be updated each time the ad went to air.  They considered it was reasonable to base the average on working days.

Assessment

Upheld

The ASA noted the data provided by Jobsite and that they considered it was unlikely that advertisers would place more than one ad for the same job.  We also noted however that it was possible that advertisers might opt to do so and therefore that role would be counted more than once, which would make the figure stated in the ad inaccurate.  We noted that the spreadsheet provided by Jobsite showed that many jobs, including those that were specific to a locality (for example Food Service Manager for Convenience Retailer in Newmarket"), appeared to have been posted a number of times.  We considered that if Jobsite could not guarantee that the same role would not be posted and therefore counted more than once, the average stated in the ad could mislead.   

We noted that Jobsite felt it reasonable to base their average on the working week but considered that the statement "we'll search through an average of 9,000 new jobs every day" would be interpreted to mean that the calculation incorporated every day of the week rather than working days only.  We noted that the "average of 9,000" stated in the ad was a greater figure than would have been the case if Jobsite had used "every day" as the basis of the calculation; that figure would have been an average of approximately 6,350.  For those reasons, and because the website was available seven days per week rather than on working days only, we considered that the average stated in the ad was misleading.  We concluded that the ad was misleading.

The ad breached CAP (Broadcast) TV Advertising Standards Code rules 5.1.1 (Misleading advertising) and 5.2.1 (Evidence).

Action

The ad must not be broadcast again in its current form.  We told Jobsite not to use misleading claims in their ads.

Adjudication of the ASA Council (Broadcast)