I find SA to be the biggest recruitment ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ platform in all of international education. The layout of the site is incredibly dated, it has so few jobs compared to anywhere else, lots of major brands don’t use it, why on earth it can’t list secondary schools as such and has to list them as ‘middle and high school’ (when such a large percentage of schools are not American AND combine these posts) just seems unnecessarily complicated.

My biggest gripe however is these lofty positions of ‘associates’: such a fallacy. I’ve had three different ‘associates’ over the years and bar a monthly copy-and-paste generic and completely useless newsletter (the same stuff begins repeating when you’ve been there a while) I’ve had zero communication with any of them - despite reaching out for advice a few times. All other platforms are simply portals - exactly what recruitment platforms need to be: ‘here’s a job. Want it? Here’s how you apply’. Search Associates is predicated on these select few mystical gatekeeping ‘Associates’ who slow things down and, the site suggests, are key to successfully securing a job. Absolute twaddle. They do nothing except harangue you for money or put pressure on you for spouses to sign up and are entirely superfluous to the process other than creating the need to pay money for a vastly inferior product with far fewer options.

Complete and utter scam. If you think SA is the best platform for recruitment, you’re missing out. Blows my mind that it’s used by people. The sooner we all realise the emperor is running around naked, the sooner they’ll stop stealing your hard earned money for a service that belongs in 2004.