Is your job ad somewhere you didn't put it?
You wrote the ad, fixed the formatting, added your company logo and paid a job board to run it. Then a candidate mentions they saw it somewhere else. Somewhere you never posted it.
That is job scraping, and it is not new. Auckland recruitment agency Rice & Co wrote last month that some job sites copy listings from other boards without the employer's say-so, and compared it to selling your house through one agent and finding it in another agent's window. In the same piece they quoted one NZ job board defending the practice: "Job aggregation is a common practice across the recruitment industry." The same board said it contacts employers to let them know their role has been shared, and gives them the option to manage or remove it. Rice & Co called the idea that this is done as a favour "nonsense".
It is not only a New Zealand issue. Andrew Schwabe, co-founder of Saigon A.I., described on HackerNoon in May how a job posted only on his company's own site appeared on LinkedIn hours later, with a working apply button, which nobody at the company had posted. That is one company's account, but it shows how it can look from the employer's side. Applications made through the copy, he said, never reach the company.
WHY IT MATTERS TO YOU
- Applications made through a copy may never reach you.
- The copy can stay up after the role is filled.
- You do not control how your ad is presented, or what a candidate is told.
- A candidate may believe they have applied to you when they have not, and may hand their CV and contact details to a site you never chose.
How to check
- Search a distinctive sentence from your ad in quotes.
- Ask applicants where they saw the ad.
- Check which partner sites your job board or applicant tracking system sends listings to. Some do this by design.
What to do
- Ask the site to remove the copy. Workable's help page says it cannot completely prevent scraping and recommends contacting the site directly.
- Close the original when the role is filled, so a stale copy cannot collect applications. Workable notes that unpublishing disables applications straight away.
Some employers will be happy with extra exposure, and that is a fair choice. It should be the employer's to make.
Separately, Trade Me's help centre warns that job scammers pretend to be real companies. A copy of your ad you didn't post is one more place where a candidate can't check who they're dealing with.
On EMeetE, every listing is posted by the employer, we do not and will never copy listings from other sites, and job seekers will never pay. Any public page can be copied, ours included, so the best protection is knowing where your ad is meant to be.
Sources: Rice & Co, "Scraping the recruitment barrel" (25 September 2026); Andrew Schwabe, HackerNoon (12 May 2026); Workable Help Centre, "Why is my job appearing on sites where I haven't posted it?"