How to Tell Your Job Board is a Ripoff
There's been a lot of media coverage recently to job boards which are merely schemes to take advantage of job seekers even though they are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. So I was very happy to see Alison Doyle of About.com tackle this very subject. Alison lists and describes a number of characteristics which are indicative of a job board which you should stay away from:
- Job boards which charge a fee to job seekers. As with the other characteristics, some boards charge fees and are legitimate, but do some research before you buy to help ensure that you're not wasting your money. Google the name of the site along with keywords like "scam" and you may find more than you wanted.
- Exclusive listings are a big red flag. No employer is going to list a position only on a job board. That position will at least be listed on the employer's own web site and, if it is, the position should also be available in the Google and Bing search results and perhaps even in the listings of aggregators like LinkUp.
- Boards that sell you on how they are posting new jobs every minute. Great, but so does almost any high traffic job board, Twitter, and other sources.
- Run, don't walk, from sites which make you guarantees like you'll find a job within a day or two. Baloney. All they can do is show you job openings. You need to apply and be better qualified than any other candidate. And how many employers go from receiving an application to hiring a candidate within a day or two? It often takes days and sometimes weeks for them to just review the applications and decide on which candidates to interview.
- Long-term service agreements are another big red flag. Some sites charge you a certain amount of money each month for access to their listings and then make it very difficult to unsubscribe from the service once you've had enough. Do you have to mail or even overnight a letter to them? Look at the fine print. You may be getting desperate, but that doesn't mean that you're stupid.
- Speaking of fine print, there shouldn't be much of it and you should be able to read it and easily understand it. If not, they've made a choice to hire an attorney who either is such a terrible writer that only other attorneys can understand the writing or is such a skilled writer that only other attorneys can understand the writing. Either way, unless you're an attorney, you want no part of their game.
- Don't ignore the warning signs that you find when you research the job board on Google and other sites like RipOff Report. If the job board has a history of dissatisfied customers, why would you be any different?
Good article. You missed a few points, but that's not surprising as there have been a large number of nefarious minds working on ways to scam job boards and job seekers for a very long time.
An important consideration for job seekers, employers, and would-be investors is the traffic that the site actually receives. Go to Alexa, and the several other sites that monitor web traffic, and find out for yourself whether they have a large enough audience to back up their claims. Do all of the monitoring sites agree, or do you find that one of them gives an anomalously high traffic value, while the others are low? This is a sure sign that the site is gaming the traffic monitoring system.
Go to google and run a search for links to their site. Are there a lot of them? Are they valid links, or simply part of link farms designed to fluff up their search engine ranking?
Do some job searches and then run searches for those same jobs at google. Are they fresh? Or, are they old listings that they scavenged from other web sites?
Frank Heasley, Ph.D.
Pres/CEO
MedZilla, Inc.
Good points, Frank. Another way is to check to see if the job board is a member of the International Association of Employment Web Sites at http://www.iaews.org. No scam sites are or can be members.
Hi Steve
Thanks - It's good to know that IAEWS is now screening their prospective members.
We decided to join again this year, and that was one of the reasons.
Best Regards,
Frank Heasley, Ph.D.
Pres/CEO
MedZilla, Inc.