I know I am a little late with my response but we have given this a great deal of thought (recruiter.co.uk, ‘Broadbean deal’, 23 October).

I admit to a vested interest as, like the job boards, we all believed that due to the nature of the data being harvested, multi-posters absolutely had to remain independent.

The Daily Mail Group will now have access to market intelligence on other job boards, ie. they will know applicant response rates of all vacancies posted by Broadbean customers on competitor job boards.

Although they dare not publish this, they could certainly target their sales activity directly at the weaknesses of their competitors. For example, if their data proved that totaljobs.com did not deliver in the ‘sales sector’, the Daily Mail Group could target its customers and offer its own sales job board brand.

Broadbean has systematically removed competition from the posting market since 2003, ie. Castle Links and Conkers are both now part of Broadbean. The recent PR that all Conkers customers will (whether they want to or not) become Broadbean customers was a surprise, as I believed they would retain Conkers and the goodwill.

However, the main issue here is that Broadbean now has a near monopoly and there is a lack of choice. And we all know what happens to the price when choice is removed.

As a result, I feel duty bound to re-introduce web-cruit to the agency market (we have been working in ‘corporate land’ for the past three years) as realistically we are the only organisation that can compete with Broadbean head-on.

While I accept that unlike Broadbean we are not a marketing monster, we are, I believe, small giants in our industry.