Home Office Careers Review. I Wouldn’t Spend a Penny on it

This review will explain what Home Office Careers is and why I don’t recommend joining it or spending anything on it either.

Quick Report on Home Office Careers:

Creator: Unknown.

Price: Free membership but offers 4 different paid membership levels with prices ranging from about $20/month to almost $300 for an unlimited membership. 

Overall Rating: 1 out of 10 stars.

I feel the quality and relevance of the jobs you find on this site versus what you look for doesn’t match well and I also tested my theory by doing the same thing on another (more popular) site which ended up giving me WAY better results. 

Home Office Careers explained (what it is):

Think of CareerBuilder.com where you can type up occupations you want to find work on, then add an “optional” fee and you have Home Office Careers, except with them, you are very limited to what you can do until you pay.

But honestly, comparing this site to CareerBuilder.com is a mistake because I did a check up on both sites for positions I was personally interested in finding and found that CareerBuilder.com is SO much better and free.

Why I don’t recommend Home Office Careers (at all):

The idea of websites trying to mimic big sites like Career Builder but charging to help you “find jobs” is really a scam idea unless the service does more than just show you jobs based on what you search for.

I haven’t yet seen anything in this program to suggest that if you submit a resume, that they will personally go out and look for occupations that are relevant to you. If they did this, then to SOME extent, I may even recommend you buy one of their cheaper memberships because at least then, there’s some kind of service being offered. 

But it may be a paid level perk that they are leaving out until I know if this is true, I would rather omit this for now and just focus on the free membership they offer and the things they provided which I was not happy with.

What does a free membership on Home Office Careers give you?

Basically you just get access to browse their database of jobs, emails and a page with resume outlines you can print but that’s about it.

Immediately after registering, they do try and get you to sign up for one of their 4 premium services:

I personally would never recommend rushing to sign up to this until you see SOME kind of indication that you get something valuable for free so that’s what I did…

I immediately went to see what type of jobs they had to offer me. And rather than browse very general occupations, I went for specifics, basically things I personally have expertise in. The goal was to find if this program could provide me with what I wanted…and it didn’t…

Experiment 1: I looked for SEO jobs.

One of the things I have the most experience in is SEO. On this site, if there are any positions associated with it, the thing I would be looking for would be things like regular businesses or SEO companies looking to hire someone who understands it.

So I typed “SEO” into the search of the site and received the following results:

After typing the occupation and searching for it, I received 100’s of results and yet, none of them were directly associated with it. And considering that SEO is a pretty big topic that many companies seek help with and I offer online consultations for, I would imagine that a good program would show me which companies are looking for SEO help.

The only job positions for SEO that were “close” were maybe a marketing position and something with writing, but nothing with the word SEO. And the first result has something to do with Bilingual English & Spanish which has not association with what I’m looking for!

Ironically, after I did the search there again, while the results were loading, I saw ONE position for it pop up, then vanish and then all the none related results appeared. I guess that one I was looking for was buried somewhere in he database and I’d have to look through the many pages of results to find it.

This makes me think the search results on this site are not set up properly or optimized to provide me with the best results. Maybe it’s because their database isn’t that big and perhaps any occupations related to SEO are hard to find there. It isn’t a common career.

But I ran the same experiment on the other site and got the following results:

At least here, I get what I’m looking for and I can also pick where I want to find it. It maybe less results, but 57 jobs and more than 1 of them being relevant is better than getting 100’s of results with 0 being relevant from the other site.

Experiment 2: I looked for anything related to writing.

I also write a lot and wanted to find positions where I could write for websites or companies (like Textbroker). This is what the first site gave me (right).

 

While the SEO search was very specific, I don’t think writing jobs are that hard to find, yet this site again cannot seem to give me anything that I’m looking for. I see job offers for anything BUT writing. 

Plus, every single result that shows up gives a VERY broad example of what I’d be doing, doesn’t provide any information on salaries or how much I could make hourly.

And by the way, that same irrelevant result asking for a Bilingual coordinator also popped up again. Again, like with the SEO thing, this had nothing to do with my search.

Now when I do that same search on CareerBuilder.com, I actually didn’t get good results either, but at least some of them were MORE relevant than the other site. I had to expand my search to outside New York to find more options. I guess for this particular position, I’d need to find it elsewhere…

The point is, you will not, at least for a free membership on Home Office Careers get good results. They don’t even have a Geo-location available. PERHAPS the paid membership has this service, but if the free option on CareerBuilder.com gives you that already, why would you want to use the other service? 

Your best chance at finding anything remotely relevant is to search the most basic type of occupation (Ex: Accounting, Education, Health, ect…) but even then you have to look through all the different places that positions are available for because again, there is NO option to find the jobs in areas where you’re located. You just type or look up a basic occupation and HOPE something pops up near or where you live (and this is still for free)…

What if you somehow find a job on that site that you like and that is close to you? Well you won’t be able to contact the employer because you will be forced to register:

So it’s very difficult to get anywhere with the free membership. There’s just multiple problems that you MAY be able to solve if you pay for it. 

Final Score: Home Office Careers

Red Flag 

1 out of 10 stars. In my opinion, MOST of the time, they will not provide the type of relevant jobs you are looking for. If they can’t do it in their free membership, I certainly don’t think it justifies paying for upgrading. The only thing that is good is their page on resumes where you can download a document to write it. 

My final thoughts:

I know CareerBuilder.com and any many other job seeking sites have their issues too and there’s companies and employers who go to those sites to advertise non-legitimate programs, but at least it’s free to look up something that suits your expertise and you have a much better chance of finding it due to the option to select the location you’re living in.

In Home Office Careers, you would at least have to get lucky in the free membership to find anything AND find it in your location but then you’re stuck because only by paying would you be able to go further.

If you’re already unemployed, don’t risk money to find out if this site will give you these options if you pay. If you already have a good resume, use the more trusted sites to find the position you’re looking for.

Update: Want to see legit work at home options? 

Here are 7 options to make money online or from home and they are all legitimate.