Ask HN: Why does it cost money to post on online job boards?

1. No website is free.<p>2. Building communities is hard and expensive (for both prospects as well as attracting listings).<p>3. The alternatives (recruiters) are really expensive (tens of thousands of dollars for some positions), the relatively small fee of these sites is very reasonable for most companies who are serious about hiring a new candidate.<p>4. This may sound odd, but companies like to spend money for services. If you have purchasing authority at a company you're more likely to go with a paid alternative even if its only marginally better, bosses are more interested in results than expenses (usually).

A business is looking to hire someone because they believe hiring that person will bring them a return on their investment. Therefore, an online job board is helping the company make money. Therefore, the company should pay for that service. You always have to pay for something in time or money. If you are not paying in money, you will have to pay more in time (ala filtering spam/irrelevant replies from Craigslist).<p>BTW, your posting is a little contradictory. In bold you write, "Nonetheless, you should be ready to make working on GoPollGo the primary focus of your life" but then state "We don't care what hours you work."

Job boards are essentially a form of ad arbitrage, they buy traffic and resell it at a higher price. Because job boards can amortize the cost of buying traffic across multiple job adverts, they can afford to buy an audience which an individual company can't.<p>Because people only look for a new job rarely, it's very hard to build a brand for a job site. Hence job sites have to advertise continuously to sustain traffic levels.<p>A job site which offered free job adverts couldn't buy traffic and hence would be mostly useless to companies looking to hire.

The same reason that it costs money to advertise on television. The job board has an audience, and you want to reach it. Attention is expensive.<p>Building an online talent community isn't easy. I know since I've been doing it for the past 3.5 years. If you can consistently deliver high quality candidates, then you can demand a really high price. This means that you either need to be really big or really targeted. Targeted is better, but most of the big names in the jobs space go for big.

My thoughts: * servers aren't free. * charging a little keeps quality up. * free job boards usually suck, so charging helps you look more legitimate. * I'd love to see a job board post stats about how their stats.

Ever seen the job boards on Craiglist? They're free, and they really suck. The signal to noise ratio on both sides becomes horrendous.

Basic capitalism: Because they can.