Should jobseekers pay?
Pay for what though? An interesting view point and a few links over here from one of my new found buddies at Recruitingbloggers.com.
Having been in recruitment for quite a few years but out of the 'hot seat' of recruiting for a while now, I have to use part memory and part right side brain power for this post. In my temp recruitment days, a lot of job seekers should have paid for wasting my time, letting me down, turning up late, doing a bad job and being just plain dumb. But to be honest, there are plenty of recruiters who do get paid for being/doing all of these anyway.
But of course this was all before the Internet. It's a brave new World now and what was no longer dictates what will be.
But job seekers do pay for recruitment services. They buy trade magazines and newspapers partly for jobs. They subscribe to sites such as Linkedin - again where they may look for jobs. OK, so they don't pay to subscribe to Monster et al but why would they. Why? Maybe they would pay if Monster held certain jobs back to gold level job seekers for a period of time. Or maybe they would pay to keep their CV private and only made available for highly matched vacancies, which may only be a few a year but they may only want a few a year.
Would they pay a premium text fee to be alerted about jobs as soon as they become available if the text message came direct from the employer rather than a job board or agency? What if they could apply for a job from their phone without having to fill in any forms as the whole process was fully automated? What about Google Adwords from job seekers - particularly relevant for contractors or interims?
Passive job seekers are only one bad day at the office, or one really good headhunting call from becoming an active job seeker. Contractors/interims need to be constantly marketing themselves in readiness for the next gig. You may not agree, but there are a lot more job seekers than recruiters/employers so someone out there will be looking at how to monetise the poor little job seeker.
