Under a recently adopted change of policy at reed.co.uk, recruitment agencies posting more than 50 jobs a year - up to a limit of 500 - on reed.co.uk are charged either £300 or £400 a month, depending on the exact package.

The move is significant because of the job board’s long-standing policy of providing significant numbers of free ads, which then attracted high numbers of candidates whose CVs filled reed.co.uk’s enviable database in a candidate-poor market. The abundance of candidates on the market now, as a result of the recession, in theory diminishes their value in comparison to the value of jobs.

Jess Wood, managing director of financial services recruiter Sandringham Wood, told Recruiter the changes hadn’t affected the number of vacancies her company posted on reed.co.uk, which remained at several hundred a year but fewer than 400. “If you want a quality job board then someone has to pay for it,” she said. “It also keeps the quality of the jobs up because if recruiters have to pay for it they make sure the quality of the job adverts is good.”

However, Jamie So, operations manager at Pertemps in London, told Recruiter: “Everybody is conscious of cost, and while two consultants did enjoy working with reed.co.uk, we now get our candidates elsewhere. Until you try other places you probably don’t know what is out there.”

Mark Rhodes, head of e-commerce and marketing at Reed.co.uk, told Recruiter that recruiters “are happy to pay for the service” because “they recognise the value of what reed.co.uk offers to the UK recruiting profession”.

Rhodes explained that the changes were driven by the need to monetise the job board and increase revenue. He said they were necessary because of “significant costs”, both in developing and maintaining the site and in “marketing it effectively”.