WOW – ANOTHER JOB BOARD ANNOUNCES ‘ZERO TOLERANCE’ POLICY AGAINST DODGY EMPLOYERS
*GRADUATE FOG EXCLUSIVE!*
A second major UK jobs website has announced that it will refuse to advertise unpaid internships that appear to break the minimum wage law. This signals a major culture change in the online recruitment industry, which has for years turned a blind eye to the brazen promotion of unpaid jobs that exploit the young people who do them and exclude those who can’t afford to do them.
Totaljobs.com has joined Monster.co.uk in accepting responsibility for the quality of the opportunities they promote and clamping down on employers looking to recruit young workers without paying them a fair wage for their work. In April, Monster became the first job board to state publicly that it would remove any adverts for unpaid internships. And yesterday, a spokesperson for Total Jobs contacted Graduate Fog to tell us:
“Totaljobs.com has always had a zero tolerance approach to fake job adverts and, since 2011, this policy also prohibits the promotion of unpaid internships on our website.
“Our guidelines are very clear; no job advert is posted that doesn’t meet UK employment and minimum wage law. In addition, for a number of years, we have worked to monitor adverts and ensure that any fake job advert is removed quickly, as well as developing a best practice approach for jobseekers if they do receive contact from a fake company.
“Totaljobs.com is also a founding member of the Recruitment Industry Counter-Fraud Forum, known as SAFER, which aims to raise awareness and combat fraudulent activities within the recruitment and HR industry.”
Graduate Fog views this announcement as a major victory in the battle for a fairer deal for interns. As efforts to make it illegal to advertise unpaid internships appear to have stalled, we are pleased – and, to be honest, pretty surprised! – to see reputable job boards actually choosing to do the right thing by young jobseekers.
For years now, we have called for the UK’s biggest job boards to ban adverts for unpaid internships, as advertising them effectively facilitates the exploitation of the young people who do them. At the same time, they lock out those who can’t afford to do them from the chance to gain the crucial experience graduates now find they need in order to even be considered for paid positions. Advertising these positions also normalises and legitimises this practice, confusing both employers and graduates about the facts on unpaid internships (namely, that they’re illegal).
We welcome Totaljobs’ announcement and hope the other big UK job boards will follow suits shortly. We’ll keep you posted…
*SHOULD ALL JOB BOARDS BAN ADVERTS FOR UNPAID INTERNSHIPS?
Are you pleased to see Totaljobs following Monster in pledging to remove adverts for internships that appear to break the minimum wage law?
*DO YOU WORK FOR ONE OF THE OTHER BIG UK JOBS WEBSITES?
Want to tell us that you’re banning adverts for unpaid internships too? Contact Graduate Fog here to tell us more
Major coup? try marketing ploy!!! and why not ask them about their policy on advertising jobs that are clearly not graduate jobs as graduate jobs – have you looked at some of the roles that purport to be grad jobs or schemes. Shamelessly taking advantage of graduates and a true warrior for justice and fairness such as yourself Tanya, should notice this!!!
@Barry
I’m not sure what you mean about graduate jobs that aren’t graduate jobs? If you give some examples I will certainly ask them… Thanks!
It’s nice to see, but I’m cautious about the wording.
“A second major UK jobs website has announced that it will refuse to advertise unpaid internships that appear to break the minimum wage law.”
That’s quite subjective. I wonder how strict their policy of determining this will be?
Totaljobs, like Monster, are the trail-blazers who’ve spotted HRMC’s recent warnings it’s going after employers who don’t pay at least NMW for real jobs. Sensibly these job boards’ management teams don’t want their companies to suffer the reputational disaster of being caught up in HRMC prosecutions.
Previously HRMC waited for the victims to complain, then acted if they did so; many unpaid interns didn’t complain because they weren’t aware their employers’ behaviour was illegal.
There should be NO internships which offer lower THAN a minim wage! This is a HUGE, MASSIVE problem in Germany, where we have NO minimum wage, and we are floating in internship offers, and a very high percentage of young people, don’t even get a job in the end!
I have started the fight against this mockery, exploitation, please follow the link to read more. https://www.facebook.com/internshipcrime
I had 5 internships within 2 years in Berlin, I can’t keep silence no more! It’s global problem, which needs an urgent attention!
@Barry: It’s far harder to define a “graduate job” than an illegal, unpaid internship, so it would harder to demand that fake “graduate jobs” weren’t marketed as such, especially when degrees in many subjects/from many unis seem to be equivalent to GCSEs or A-levels a generation ago, and jobs requiring a degree – either explicitly or in practice – keep increasing.
So I’d say it’s a a little bit of progress, though I still can’t help feeling we’re trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted with a lot of these efforts 🙁 I can’t help feeling that the unregulated market value of so much labour being basically zero is probably a sign of some serious problems with the system.