Recruiters face a legal grey area over 'job scraping' - the practice by unscrupulous job boards of copying and providing links to job advertisements from competitor websites.

Gareth Williams, head of recruitment law at Penn Legal, who also used to be a recruitment consultant, told Recruiter that job boards have no legal recourse against the two forms of job scraping, which he has christened 'hard' and 'soft'.

Hard job scraping involves the brazen copying and posting of job adverts from competitor or corporate websites.

Soft job scraping is when the data published on the job scraper's website has a 'deep link' taking the potential candidate to specific information on an originating job board or employer's website.

“At the current time there is no established case law in England determining whether the practice of job scraping, whether in its hard or soft variety, is legal,” said Williams.

“However, I believe that job scraping in both its hard and soft varieties is illegal, involving breaches of the Employment Agencies Regulations 2003, the Copyright and Database Regulations 1997, and potentially breaches of the Data Protection Act 1998 and the law on copyright.”

The online recruitment industry has an uneasy truce with competitors who perform soft job scraping, because scraped job boards can generate more publicity for their client, who can potentially benefit from their vacancies being advertised more widely.

But hard job scraping is becoming an increasing concern for some of the major online recruiters.

Monster UK & Ireland has been scraped three times in the last six months.

“Clients were using search engines to find where their jobs were ranked. After doing so, they saw the URL and applications were not going to Monster or a partner site,” said Diana Sabey, director of product and content, Monster UK & Ireland.

“This prompted them to call us as they were losing the ability to identify and effectively manage their job ads and applicants via Monster's recruiter back office.”

However, Jobsite marketing director Felix Wetzel believes the market should be left to “sort itself out”.

“This business is not just about having volume of job ads, it's about matching the needs of your clients with your candidates,” he said.