For legitimate quality job boards, one of the greatest bug bears is recruitment agencies running job boards. To be fair, most job board owners don’t object to recruitment agents running job boards per se. What blows their top is when recruitment agents operate a job board and hide the fact or are in some way disingenuous about it.

Now it must be said that many recruitment agencies operate job boards and are happy to admit it. They state, for example, that advertising on their site may result in their recruitment consultants ringing you up. And it’s made clear to candidates that their uploaded CV’s may be sent to their consultants.

But many recruitment agency owned job boards don’t clearly reveal this. If you dig around their terms and conditions you might just find mention of it. But most of recruitment agency owned job boards look and smell like real job boards.

The main reason that they don’t reveal their true ownership is that they don’t want their recruitment consultant competitors knowing about it. When a competitor posts a job on a recruitment-agency owned job board, not only are they revealing their new clients to the recruitment agency that owns the job board, but they also act to attract candidates that the recruitment agency operating the job board may quickly try to sell on to their client whom the advertiser is trying to help.

There are lots of such sites out there. They succeed because few people do the necessary check on job boards. In conducting research for whatjobsite, we check postal addresses, office addresses, domain ownership and even Companies House when we think we are onto a dubious site. Clearly, someone looking to advertise a job won’t do this.

But it’s not just recruitment agencies that suffer. Direct clients get a bad deal too. Not only do they pay to post their jobs on the recruitment-agency owned job board, but then they are mysteriously and inexplicably contacted by recruitment consultants who want them to pay a fee for filling the job that they just paid to advertise on their site. In effect, you are paying for the privilege of telling a rec con about your live vacancies.

You can see why quality job boards are so rightly annoyed by such operations. And, this is also why we launched the Whatjobsite Approved Website Award. You’ll also be glad to know that we don’t include such sites amongst our recommended sites on whatjobsite.