It wasn’t long after job boards were “invented” that someone thought of the concept of job scraping. If you can’t get enough vacancies posted on your site why not simply “copy” them from elsewhere, thus giving the impression of a busy job board. Some job boards do this covertly and jobseekers may not even be aware the job was originally posted elsewhere, whereas for other job boards this is their clear business model (including to a certain extent the job search engine sites like clickajob).
However, when a site scrapes your vacancies, adds additional (and untrue) information and then refuses to remove them it’s got to be pretty annoying.
This is the situation Emma Mirrington (Talent Attraction Manager at Sky) encountered when an employee pointed out a vacancy in his department posted on the www.experteer.co.uk website.
Experteer is a “career service for high calibre professionals”. They make their money from jobseekers and the service is connecting them with recruiters and vacancies (it appears all scraped from corporate websites).
When Emma saw the vacancy on the Experteer website her main concern was that the suggested salary was £20,000 more than what was actually on offer. She phoned to ask for the role to be removed, she spoke with the MD of Experteer who “was rude to the point of offensive, said he didn’t need our permission and refused to take them off”.
To my mind the main issues are these:
a) scraping vacancies from sites without permission is intrinsically wrong (although debatably legal)
b) posting “guessed” salary information is bound to be mis-reprenstative in many cases and makes it far worse (and potentially damaging to the organisation)
c) Refusing to remove jobs, when asked by the employer, is very poor practice
d) Getting into a fight with someone who is involved in a HR recruitment network as large as the one Emma is involved in (The FIRM – which I will write about in more detail in future) is foolish
With regard to the legal aspect; Emma and many others from The FIRM were in touch with Experteer via email correspondence and some of it makes for interesting reading:
“Further to your request to remove *** job links from our site, the roles advertised by Experteer are all publicly accessible on the internet or posted by head hunters directly within our site. Similar to search engine Google, searches for appropriate job advertisements and then, applying various criteria such as target group and region, segments them and makes them available to people who are looking for jobs. We have been advised that we do not need any specific authorization for jobs to be referenced on our site in this way and our activities are entirely lawful. In the circumstances you cannot insist that the references you refer to are removed from our website.”
As it happens all the Sky jobs have now been removed, athough around 40 members of The FIRM are now experiencing the same issue of not being able to get theirs taken off.
I guess for me the bottom line is that I personally believe this to be a lazy business practice, poorly executed (ie, wrongly guessing salaries) with the icing on the cake of an arrogant management response to a complaint.
But, I’m open to other opinions!
I think it goes to prove that in these new fangled internet days how important it is to provide good customer service and how quick word can spread when you don’t.
I think Emma had posted on the FIRMs forum within a couple of hours of this happening and on Twitter too. That’s thousands of potential customers of Experteer knowing what kind of brick wall Emma has faced.
Greig
I had missed your blog post about this – sorry.
Showing the way this story “broke” over Twitter: http://blog.talentrevolt.com/post/Experts.aspx
Regards
Louise
Ouch! Sounds like Experteer have some bridges to build… Would be interesting to see if/how they can recover from something like this.
Nick (n00b)
Experteer must hang there heads in shame. In a competitve market place (or any market in fact) credibility is essential. The amount of jobseekers I meet nowadays who say the same thing …”I’ve applied for jobs through agencies on numerous occasions. They register me and then I hear nothing, do these jobs actually exist????” Like anything, you get out as much as the effort you put in.
On the plus side, as a small dental recruitment agency, this practice can sometimes be useful. I have noticed jobs from my site appearing on other jobs sites where I didn’t post them, and the jobs link back to us, helping our google PR ranking. Having said that adding or changing the details of the ads is obviously not on.
Quick update…. Last week I spoke with a recruiter who works for a search firm who has used and had a good experience with Experteer. She was contacted by their sales team and asked to sign up for the free job posting service. She put up a couple of roles (none were “scraped” from her site) and one of them was filled by a candidate from the Experteer site. She told me she was really pleased with the relationship and would continue to use them.
Now, of course, if that’s how Experteer posted all the vacancies on the site, and dealt with all the recruiters no one would be unhappy would they?
Job scraping seems to be a common feature that a lot of recruitment agencies want but it can in no way be stable or consistent, since it relies on the structure of the website code to be able to be scraped, and each website is different, so results will never be accurate.
Also, scraping can break as soon as the target website updates its code.
I would say that TypePad is easier to use than Blogger. I think it’s one of the easier user-interfaces I’ve used.
I learned that if you hate your job or employment situation, you will lose it. So either learn to like it and keep it, or find something else before they find someone else.
job scraping… I guess I can live with it (somewhat). What I do not agree though is the fact that Experteer is fooling job seekers to believe that they have some sort of exclusivity and their salary “benchmark” is obviously grossly overestimated. Where it becomes frankly a spam is when Experteer ask job seeker to actually pay to browse job openings that are available elsewhere and inaccurate because of wrong salary estimates.
And I am not talking about the “exclusive head hunter” access.
Experteer is the biggest scam ever! The only thing they know is to take money from jobseekers against jobs you can find for free on monster or other jobboards. It’s easy to take advantage of jobseekers in need. This is TOTALY illegal in the UK, France and other EU countries! And when you try to contact them to get explanations or help, they are simply not there! 0 customer service and rude when answering emails.
This should not exist!
Their competitor : http://www.theladders.co.uk is even worse… same practice… SCAM! check out blogs and forums on them. No one is doing something about this?
It is impossible to get in touch with experteer as they keep taking money from my account on a rolling basis, not sure what the exclusivity is that they are providing. something needs to be done to get scammers like them off the market.
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Happiness is a thankful heart, a healthy body, the work of a heart, a love your lover, a trusted friend to help, I wish you all! Through the long time, count fragrant memories, please remember me, like I always think of you.
I found experteer while looking for a job and it all sounded very fishy. I didn’t fill my profile at all and started receiving mails telling me “A headhunter is looking for you” and stuff like that. Experteer is pure deception and probably a scam. Beware!
I have never previously been on or registered with experteer.com. When I found myself unemployed I posted my cv on monster.co.uk as I had used them before. Now I recieve upto 10 emails a day offering me positions through experteer. The emails are very poor english & sound like some sort of scam but I cant seem to stop them from coming!! Sounds like its not only job positions they are scraping but personal information too! Warning to all!