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How to reduce spam on your job board?

Updated

As your job board is publicly accessible, it may occasionally attract unwanted traffic, including spam accounts and automated bots. While some unwanted activity is difficult to avoid entirely, there are several ways to reduce it and keep your platform's content relevant and reliable.

Our DevOps team monitors your site for unusual bot activity. If we spot any, we contact you and agree on the necessary measures together.

What counts as spam?

Your job board is primarily intended for candidates looking for jobs and recruiters or companies looking to hire. Accounts promoting unrelated services or products may be spam.

Examples include:

  • Accounts with names like "Assignment Helpers".
  • Users advertising essay writing or academic assistance.
  • Individuals or companies promoting services unrelated to recruitment or job searching.

If you are unsure whether an account or activity is spam-related, we can help you investigate.

What options are available?

There are three main options to help reduce spam activity:

  1. Country Blocking
    If you notice that a significant amount of unwanted traffic comes from specific countries, we can block access to your job board from those locations. Users accessing your platform from blocked countries will no longer be able to log in, register, reset their password, apply for jobs or create job alerts.

    Keep in mind: This also affects existing users with accounts or saved job alerts. Consider whether you have legitimate users in these countries before enabling this option, as they will also be blocked from accessing the site.

    If you would like to use this option, send a list of countries that you would like to block to your Project Manager or Customer Success Manager.
     

  2. Google reCAPTCHA
    Google reCAPTCHA v2 helps block bots with an "I'm not a robot" checkbox. It checks whether a real person is submitting the form, which reduces automated sign-ups and applications.

    It can currently be enabled for:
    - Applicant registration
    - Recruiter registration
    - Job applications

    I'm not a robot
    🔄
    reCAPTCHA

      

  3. Recruiter Approval by Site Admins
    Recruiters can publish content on your job board, so it helps to check new accounts before they go live. With recruiter approval enabled, site admins are notified about each new registration and can:

    Approve: Allow recruiters to publish organization profile information and jobs, and make purchases.
    Keep pending: Recruiters can log in, but organization profile information, job publishing, and purchases will remain unavailable until approval is complete.
    Block: Prevent the user from logging in to the recruiter dashboard.

ⓘ Please note

This option requires your team to have the resources to monitor registrations and act as fast possible. We recommend it primarily if you are experiencing significant spam activity in recruiter registrations.

For more information, see: Approval of new recruiter users by site admins.
 

What do we recommend?

Start with one of these measures and check whether it reduces spam or fake registrations. If it doesn't, add further measures step by step.

Also review your user database and published content regularly, including organization profiles and job postings.

💡 Tip

It's also worth keeping an eye on your analytics, particularly traffic sources and unusual increases in registrations, job postings or applications.

What measure can help with which type of spam?

  • A lot of unwanted traffic from countries outside your target market? → Consider enabling country blocking
  • Fake registrations or applications generated by bots? → Consider enabling Google reCAPTCHA
  • Spam job postings or suspicious recruiter accounts? → Consider enabling recruiter approval

To activate any of these options, please get in touch with your Jobiqo contact person.