Sleeping With The Enemy

This week, Jobspeed, a new IT job board website was launched. Superficially, the marketing propaganda is probably making recruiters prick their ears up to listen. The site’s run by a consortium of recruiters, thus the we-know-what-you-need-come-over-here-and-be-with-others-of-your-own-kind spiel. It’s promising a faster service, real jobs and the pay per application fee seems, at the outset at least, to be fair.

Let’s look a little more deeply at this, though. We might find that if we scratch the surface, all that glossy, almost-dry paint might start to chip off in slimy chunks, only to reveal something that recruiters might want to steer clear of.The main problem with this concept is that it is run by recruiters, lead by Lloyd Harrington Recruitment. Even if you’re a recruiter and you’re prepared, say, in a moment of conciliation and peace to all the brothers and sisters to overlook the fact that by paying them instead of Seek, you’re feeding the opposition, would you want that same opposition plumper and stronger but also with access to all the applicant information from applicants applying for your jobs? Nup.

While employers aren’t discouraged from advertising, I don’t see how they could be encouraged to recruit from the site at the same rate as recruiters are charged. Perhaps they are being offered a different rate?And if you’re just reading this article for my witty banter, and if you don’t give a stuff about outcomes for employers or recruiters, but one day, it might be 40 degrees outside and the aircon at your office is broken and the woman in the next cubicle is munching like a cow on a packet of Thins, and they stink because they’re cheese and onion, and you decide to go to Jobspeed to check out their ‘real jobs’, then ask yourself how they’re going to verify the realness of the jobs. Are they going to check each and every one for credibility, or simply black card the recruiters known for posting false positions. Ask yourself that.

I have always been an advocate of recruiters running their own job boards. I think that if we are ever to become independent of job boards such as Seek, that this is the way to go. But with Jobspeed, as it is a consortium, there is really no difference from the recruiter’s perspective. We are still paying someone else to sell our wares.