Robbie Cowling, managing director of Jobserve, has called on recruitment agencies to stop placing fake adverts on job sites because the practice is damaging the industry's image.

Cowling said that job boards alone could not stamp out the bad practices that have tarnished the public perception of recruitment.

He urged agencies to think about the long-term consequences of their actions and stop placing bogus adverts on job sites to trawl for candidates.

And he urged the REC to ensure that members followed its code of practice, which outlaws fake adverts.

'The REC must make sure that its members adhere to its own code of conduct. It is impossible for us to know whether every job is real, even though we do check every single job posted – but what we can do is to make it clear to agencies that we don’t want that sort of thing,' he said.

REC members placing fake ads should receive a "ticking off", but they should not be expelled from the organisation, he said.

Cowling made his comments at the REC’s IT Division in December, chaired by Toni Cocozza, managing director of the IT recruiter DP Connect.

Jobserve is one of the few online recruiters to be expanding in these difficult times and has taken on 30 new staff over the last year.

However, Cowling admitted that the downturn has hit the company’s performance: 'We are doing 40% of what we were doing this time last year – but we are preparing for the upturn.'