A reader asked me a good question the other day. He writes;
I am planning to start my niche job board in Finland. In order to start I was thinking of going through companies’ career pages and then copy their job on my job board. My job board though would act only as a gathering tool, there would be no sign up, and users will be redirected to the company’s page (where the job came from) to apply. I would not “steal” jobs from other people’s job boards.
Now, my question is, is doing this somehow illegal? and could it be considered immoral by the company? At the end I am giving them free exposure…I would really appreciate if you could help me with this legal dilemma!
Now I’m not a lawyer so take this with a ‘grain of salt’. I know that many job boards have done this and are still doing so to fill their job boards up with job postings. Is it legal? I dont have an honest answer. I suppose you could be violating some sort of copyright law but i dont know any employer would sue you over sending them free traffic. So my solution would be to copy only a portion of the job posting (the first half of it) and tell your users if they want the full job description they must click the link to that employers’ website.
I did hear that some years ago even the big job search engines were indexing employer job feeds (without permission) so if they got away with it I dont why you cant.
