Paid Job Board

Saturday, October 31st, 2009 - Job Boards, employment, job application

Paid Job Board

Dave, an oil rig worker, asks: Can job sites that ask for a fee before you can upload a CV be trusted? I’m currently looking for work on a offshore oil rig but many of the job boards I find ask for a fee. What do you think?

In answer:
Yes, the pay Job Boards can be trusted – if you apply a few tests. But why would you pay as a job searcher?

Job Board Tests

You should apply a few tests to any job board, and these apply to paid as well as free to access. Check the registration details of the site by:

• Contact: is there a contact address, and phone number? If in doubt, call the number
• Registration: use whois.net to check the registration. This will also let you know how long the site has been going
• Payment: what is the form of payment? With services such as PaylPal and Google checkout you know there is a checking and refund policy to protect you. Service such as WorldPay may be cheaper for you, and also provide good refund policies in the case of non-delivery/fraud

Now you know that the service is legitimate, check the number of jobs. Check the total number of jobs, by doing an “empty field” search (ie: not filling out any/as few as possible fields). I undertook a check on a local area Job Board recently, that stated it had 200 jobs available. However, on checking the details, the true number was less than 30. The reason was simply that many job boards allow weekly repeats of the same advert, with four week advert durations – this automatically multiplies the number of available jobs by four.

Most free and paid for jobs boards will allow you to search for a type of job, and show you how many of those jobs exist. Less than 20, and your chances of finding a job are low.

Direct to Employer/Recruiter

The reason many of the paid for job boards exist, are that they are located in markets where numbers of employees are low, and wages high.

Most are based on either exclusivity, or mass distribution. In the case of exclusivity, they still charge us recruiters, and as we know there won’t be many job seekers, we ignore them. In the case of the paid distributors, they try to entice us to sign up to their spam.

personally, from experience I conclude that before you pay to join a job board, you would be better off approaching either the employers or the specialist recruiters in those fields directly. Employers and recruiters only look at jobs boards when they need someone – other wise, they are just background noise.

Good Luck!

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2 Responses to “Paid Job Board”

1. Tweets that mention Paid Job Board | Professional CV Writing - CV4.biz -- Topsy.com Says:
   October 31st, 2009 at 1:01 pm

   [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ian R McAllister, cv4biz. cv4biz said: socialmedian: Paid Job Board http://bit.ly/1VcWCm [...]

2. uberVU - social comments Says:
   October 31st, 2009 at 1:25 pm

   Social comments and analytics for this post…

   This post was mentioned on Twitter by cv4biz: socialmedian: Paid Job Board http://bit.ly/1VcWCm...

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