PAY VS. FREE JOB BOARDS

Is it ever ethical for job boards to charge job seekers to view and/or apply to ads?

As the owner of a free-for-candidates job board, I’m inclined to say no, it is never ethical for job boards to charge job seekers to view job listings.

Why? First, it is my experience that most of these pay-to-view sites main source of revenue is based on making it very difficult for job seekers to unsubscribe from the service. To me, this is a SCAM. To make matters worse, this SCAM is perpetrated on young people and those who are out of work; both of these groups tend to have less disposable income.

Second, the pay-to-view sites don’t usually deal with the hiring companies directly. Rather, they scrape job sites using robot code. Job seekers have no way to know if these scraped jobs have the most recent revisions OR if they are even active at all.

Third, the jobs on pay-to-view sites can be found on other sites for free. Ultimately, these pay-to-view sites are a complete waste of money.