Tues 27 March 2012
In March last year a major extension of the Advertising Standards Authority's (ASA) code of conduct came into force.  

The ASA exists to protect the public by ensuring that advertising is legal, decent, honest and truthful. The extension of the ASA code meant that for the first time it covers employer’s own websites, including their careers pages. It also includes other non-paid for online content under the advertiser’s control such as a company’s LinkedIn and Facebook site.

However, a year on there are still question marks about the impact of the change on the recruitment sector.

As Recruiter reported last month
As early as July, however, the signs were promising that the extension was beginning to bite following an  adjudication decision involving Totaljobs.

Totaljobs had claimed on it website in March that there were 94,618 jobs from 4,743 companies across the UK. In its decision, the adjudication panel said it found that the ad was misleading, could not be substantiated, and was exaggerated, and therefore breached the code.

It was a textbook example of how the new regime, was supposed to operate. As a result, Totaljobs changed its masthead, and now provides a full explanatory text for jobseekers on its website as to what a job advertisement actually is.

And Totaljobs was not alone to fall foul of the new rules. According to the ASA, in the first 12 months of the new regime, it received 119 complaints about 111 recruitment-related claims.  Of these 62 were complaints about claims on companies websites, of which 12 were upheld.  This compares with a total of 32 complaints in 2010.