Hijacking Competitors Job Adverts

Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 12:21pm Friday 24 July 2009

Do you want your competitors to work for you? Easy. Redirect candidate traffic and visitors away from the competitor by hijacking their job advert.

With the increased use of RSS feeds and job aggregation software (and very smart and savvy IT programmers) you can make competitors and the rest of the industry drive traffic & job applications back to your own agency.

This is how some recruiters have been doing it.....

All you need is a competitors (or job boards) RSS job feed, job aggregation software, a few twitter accounts, some catchy tag lines and a IT computer programmer.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of twitter accounts that automatically distribute jobs or “feed” these into the system. When a user clicks on the link they are redirected to either a 2 framed webpage with the job in one frame, and a small top/bottom frame with the competitor’s details/slogan/apply now links. The other option (which is quite complex to program) is to overlay the existing “apply now” link or image with YOUR application form link.

Candidates are none the wiser and assume that either the top frame is part of the job application process and would have no idea that the job has been hijacked.

There are various job aggregation scripts that are available off the shelf. You collect RSS feeds from job boards, recruitment agencies or employers and feed these into your database. Within a few weeks you have built a database of thousands of jobs. Job aggregation software is very SEO friendly and it won’t take long to build up some traffic. The other option is to feed these hijacked jobs into twitter where you can easily build thousands of followers in a short amount of time.

I’m not going to give away anymore information on whom and how people are currently doing this. Is this ethical? No, but it is being done.