Should Job Seekers Pay to Play?

One of the issues raised at TAtech’s recent Leadership Summit on Recruitment Marketing was the huge number of applications some employers are now receiving from AI powered bots. According to the recruiters in the room, most if not all of these applications are from unqualified job seekers, and worse, their sheer number often overwhelms the recruiting team and makes it all but impossible for them to identify the qualified candidates who have applied.

This problem is almost certain to grow as these AI application bots become more prevalent in the job market. So, what’s to be done?

The following is one idea. It was posted on a social media site by Alexander Chukovski, Founder & CEO of Crypto-Careers.com. He wrote:

Charge job seekers $1 per application.

There, I dropped the bomb.

To keep my reputation in this space, I want to mention that it is not my idea; I saw it on Reddit.

However, having spent years in the crypto space, I will not lie when I say that I have considered a credit card pre-authorization to reduce the onslaught of AI-automated applications and a form of pre-validation.

We have similar concepts in crypto, where you first have to authorize a small transaction from your crypto wallet to verify that you are not a bot before exploring investment options.

But our industry has been very cautious about charging job seekers.

There are plenty of rationales behind it, but most arguments come from the time BAAA – Before AI Auto Apply.

However, the person who wrote the post pitching the idea did not come from the perspective of a company receiving 1000s of applications to a single job.

They came from the perspective of how discouraging it is for job seekers to see on LinkedIn that certain jobs have thousands of applications and how this actually pushes you as a candidate to create way more applications than you would usually send.

This makes the process bad for ALL sides, and it is a net loss for all three sides of the marketplace:
• the job seeker wasting time to apply to jobs they don’t have a chance to get anyway
• the employer, getting too many irrelevant applies
• the marketplace, which in the eyes of the employer is delivering unqualified applicants.

Rarely do I see such lose-lose-lose scenarios in online recruiting.

Companies should not make money from applicants, and the author suggests that the money be donated to a charity of the company’s choice.

Interestingly, Upwork has a similar system for freelancers when they apply to jobs. The system is called “Connects” and you can buy them before submitting a bid to a job.

So, all facts considered, what do you think?

Will companies start asking candidates to pre-authorize credit cards or even pay to apply?

Is that the best way to keep sanity in the system?