Job boards hit back at recruiters that ‘resell’ their data
Ian Partington of Simply Jobs Boards told an audience at the Job Board Summit, held at the Hilton Metropole in London last month (November), that “resellers” pose a big threat to the job board industry.
“These are people who are basically robbing us – they are robbing the job board business. It is as simple as that,” said Partington.
During the session on current trends affecting job boards in the UK, Partington said the types of resellers causing problems were those that have a contract with job boards and then open up the sites so their clients can advertise on them.
“They use our CV database and instead of recruiting for themselves they open our sites up for the rest of their clients. They say ‘here’s the login details for a CV database – knock yourself out. That’s £100 please. Thank you very much’. It has happened. We have been hit pretty badly by this in the past.”
This is different to a recruiter that uses a job boards to help them fill vacancies for clients that pay them a fixed fee for doing so, explained Lee Biggins, managing director at CV Library. “As long as there is a recruitment process – somebody is physically doing something to vet the CV before they send it over – we put them in the fixed-fee bracket.”
He added: “You have to do mystery calling, you have to look at their website and you have to know your client.”
Job boards should be wary of “two-man band” recruiters asking for large quantity of CV downloads and jobs per month, Partington said. When approaching potential automotive clients, he made the grim discovery that some were already “advertising” on the site via a reseller.
To tackle the problem, Simply Jobs Boards identified the culprits and cancelled all of its contracts with illegitimate resellers. Although this cost a lot of money it was the “morally” right thing to do, said Partington. “It was a short-term loss for a long-term gain,” he added.
Commenting on website security, Partington said: “I’ll put my hand up and say we weren’t as secure as we probably should have been. I don’t think you need to be NASA or NATO to be able to operate a job board, but we implemented IP address tracking and things of that nature… this has been really effective.”
Biggins contacted the police to deal with two resellers, which he claimed had been fraudulently stealing people’s user names and passwords, which they used in conjunction with multi-posting software. “It is getting very dirty,” said Biggins.
According to Biggins the companies in question have now closed.
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