I refer to the secret shopper's comments in Get a job (Career guide, IT2, 21 March). Indulging in a little on-line shopping therapy to find a new job, quite rightly, he visited reed.co.uk. However, I found some of his ensuing remarks surprising.

Reed.co.uk is a quick, comprehensive and totally user-friendly way of finding a job online. Secret shopper says it took him 15 minutes to search the site for jobs and he had to provide his personal details before a search was begun. Why?

If he used the quick search function on the home page to search for a job he would have had an immediate search with results in seconds. Providing personal details is only necessary for registration if you want to apply for a job and on average, registration takes 10 minutes.

The confusion deepens as secret shopper says that no suitable jobs could be found. Where was he looking?

By selecting a permanent job in the general insurance sector in the West Midlands at a salary between £20,000 and £25,000, I retrieved three pages of jobs from which to choose.

There are currently over 5,000 insurance jobs on reed.co.uk that can be searched in seconds using the quick search facility. In the same week that secret shopper did his worst, more than one million searches were run on reed.co.uk by people looking for a job.

Richard Frodin
Sales and marketing director
Reed Insurance Selection

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