In quite the coincidence given my recent rants/posts about improving recruitment of digital roles in public service – which included some pointed jabs at Civil Service Jobs (CSJ) – this week they opened up their new Beta version of the site for feedback (and also started hiring for a Senior Service Designer).

The Beta has had a pretty critical reception from those famously level-headed folks over on Reddit and I don’t want to pile on but it does feel like a bit of a missed opportunity and unready for prime-time even for a Beta release.

On the plus side it does seem to resolve the mythically bad default URLs from ‘classic’ CSJ – which is a massive cause for celebration. Moving to OneLogin is also probably a good move for the medium/long term even if it causes some initial discomfort (I assume application histories will be lost.)

I’m also hopeful some of the choices that have been made will remove the annoying Catchpa.

That is about it for the positives though for now.

The most prominent issue I can see is that the search needs significant tuning. I believe the Beta has access to all the same live vacancies as CSJ ‘classic’ but there are significant differences in results for the same queries and the Beta seems far less accurate (and the current site isn’t without its own issues there!).

For 10 searches on keywords I use every week for my newsletter research the Beta provided fewer and less relevant results on every occasion. Hopefully this can be resolved quickly because it immediately damages the trust in the new site.

There have also been some interesting decisions for the search results page itself. Only five results are returned per page – from 25 of the ‘classic’ site. That is a massive change. Additionally there are no pagination/next page links at the end of the results so you need to scroll back up to the top to move to the next page of results (which you will definitely need to given you only get five poor results to start with.) Now it might be that there is (or will be) an option to configure the amount of results you see per page but I couldn’t find it.

To be fair to the Beta I think some of the UI issues are amplified by the ‘lift and shift’ of content that was intended for a different layout and ‘design system’ so it is hard to make a judgement at the moment but there definitely seem to be some spacing and text sizing choices that are suboptimal. There are some new design elements available to the job descriptions from the ‘design system’ that will definitely be useful though.

On the technical side it seems that it doesn’t work at all with Javascript off (I know this isn’t really something people care about much anymore but I think public services still should) and has some additional performance issues – especially on lower bandwidth connections.

Other things I am interested in like sharing tools, subscriptions, RSS, APIs etc are an unreasonable expectation at this point so I’ll keep my power dry there!

The lack of any kind of blogpost or release note providing context and insight into choices, decisions and ambitions is disappointing. I think Civil Service Jobs falls under the purview of Cabinet Office Digital and they have a blog – though it hasn’t been updated in several months.

Now of course this may be coming – it is easy for these things to fall out of sync given the layers of approvals these days but if it is I hope it lands soon.

Anyway that is enough for now. I’m really rooting for this to be a success – I know I am far from a standard user and won’t feature on any personas but I spend an awful lot of time on that website and if it launched without fixing a lot of these issues I think that would come to an end and thus so would my jobs newsletter.