Job Boards are about as rare as cell phones - there are just too many. Over the past 3 years, the number of "minor" job sites has skyrocketed. The reason so many job boards exist is because they're cheap to operate, provide a great means to collect emails, on-page ads and traffic generation.

So what's the drawback of using one of the many "free" job sites? Will they hurt or help my company? It depends...

We place our client's ads on many job boards, big and small. We avoid posting on free sites outside of Craigslist, Indeed and Simplyhired. The aforementioned sites are well established and have stop-gaps for quality control. As our parents told us growing up, there's always a price (especially when something is "free").

Over 20 years of industry experience has made us cautious for the following reasons:

Reputation Management - A growing concern because your web fingerprint doesn't disappear, your whole online history is logged in some form or another. If you're associated with a site that has several complaints about fraudulent postings, you could experience "guilt-by-association".

Phishing - The act of illegally gathering information while posing to be reputable. Free sites rarely have any quality control practices for their postings, which makes them a perfect vehicle for phishing.

Posting Scams - There's been a huge surge in fraudulent postings, mostly associated with work-at-home positions. Some current statistics indicate nearly 85% of work-at-home postings are misleading and only exist to collect a "registration fee" from the job seeker.

Brand Management - Goes hand in hand with reputation management; is this site worthy of your company's name. Check out who has current postings on the site and see the quality of the postings (i.e. how well they're written, type of contact info, do any postings say you'll make 15K the first month etc..).

There are cost saving options to be found just be cautious when you receive a solicitation from a free jobsite.

-Rick Walsh has worked for Ad Club since 2000. Ad Club Advertising has been the vendor of choice to place recruitment ads since 1987. Clients nationwide receive full agency services and great customer service without paying added fee's.  Please contact Rick with questions or comments: rwalsh@adclub.com