Why don’t job boards reveal their prices?

Life is hard for the employer recruiter: thousands of job boards, Google cluttered with SEO sites, and Zombie job boards all over the place. And then, after all that, they get to a job board and can’t even find out the price of job posting.

In recent months whatjobsite has been rolling out the whatjobsite approved website award. Our goal with the award is to allow employers to identify quality job boards on which to advertise their vacancies. We look at sites according to a lot of criteria: does the site meet company law, does it carry employer jobs, does it have proper contact information etc. You can find out more here

But one of the things we also look for is clear pricing.  We believe employers have the right to know what it costs to advertise a job on a job board.

Quality job boards (and all whatjobsite approved websites) do offer an indication of price — even if it’s the most basic product like a credit card quick post. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

But many job boards don’t reveal their prices. Even when you ring them up they cautious about telling you the price. Of course, many such websites want clients to ring up to talk to them about their job posting products. And, in a way, one can almost understand the logic of not revealing prices in this instance. Sometimes they have to find you the right product.

But what is extraordinary and incomprehensible is that many job boards offer a credit card job posting product but still refuse to tell the employer what the price is. This is, in our view, is simply unacceptable. Is there any other situation where you have to register your personal/business details on a website (and agree to its terms) in order to find out what the price of the product you want to buy is? It’d be the end of ecommerce as we know it.

Think about Ryanair. You know the complaint: it was supposed to be a free flight but ended up costing a fortune. People complained about Ryanair because they didn’t reveal the final cost of  the flight. Or felt it was misleading. Ryanair have done much to clean this up. And now they give the full flight costs or explain the extras.

But imagine if Ryanair were to require potential customers to do what we had to with one job board: input all our information, agree to their terms, sign up to an account, then go to their email inbox to confirm the account, then log back into the website and then, and only then, be told the price of the flight? It would simply be unacceptable. And yet job board after job board persist in this practice.

And let’s not forget one other small issue with this practice: it’s against the law. If you offer a service to be purchased online you are required to show clear and transparent pricing. That’s why  job board that don’t offer clear and transparent pricing aren’t whatjobsite approved websites.