Is Geebo Legit
Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more jobs from well-known companies posted through a site called Geebo. When I search for jobs on Google, I frequently see companies like GE, Time Warner, and others listed through this Geebo site. So I decided to investigate it this week. I found that the site listed A LOT of jobs and that excited me at first. But as I dug into the jobs more and read what others had to say, I definitely had some questions and concerns.
What Is Geebo
When you go to the website, it reminds me of Craigslist. It’s not a job board at all. It’s a marketplace to buy and sell things with jobs being one of the classifieds you can list. That wasn’t a red flag for me because I know from my recruiting days that Craigslist could be a gold mine of candidates and jobs for certain roles. So I continued to investigate further.
Is Geebo a Legit Website
The community-based classifieds website itself seems to be quite legitimate. It’s been around since 2000 when it was started by Greg Collier, an entrepreneur from Sacramento. Individuals can post merchandise, services, and rentals for free.
They can also post jobs; however, it does cost money to do so. Job seekers can also post their resume for free.
How Does Geebo Make Money
This is always one of my first questions when evaluating new sites because it gives me clues about its safety and legitimacy. Geebo, like many online classifieds sites, appears to make money in 3 different ways.
From people posting job advertisements (they pay a small fee to list it for 30 days).
From display advertisements.
From affiliates.
The first one I expected of anyone that lists jobs. Every job board I know charges people to advertise their job openings. Display ads are also very common on other sites. Affiliates too are common; however, something bothered me when you had to participate (in what appears to be) resume database affiliate programs. I’ll talk more about this later.
Overall, I found the website itself to be pretty safe and legitimate. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have scammers posting fake listings.
Are Geebo Jobs Legit
The real question I wanted to tackle before recommending any new site is if the job listings specifically are legitimate. It’s great if you’re looking for a new camper, but I’m looking for jobs. As I reviewed the job listings I had some concerns. Let’s take a look at how Geebo jobs really work and what you should look out for if you choose to use this job search site.
Geebo Appears to Scrape Other Sites (Yellow Flag)
All of the jobs you see on Geebo are not from paying customers. The first tip I had was the sheer number of professional-level jobs, including VP-level roles.
Classifieds Aren’t Used to Senior-Level Roles
You see, classifieds like Craigslist and Geebo are great when you have to fill warehouse jobs, entry-level supply chain roles, or even accounts payable positions. But I would never post senior-level roles on these sites. It didn’t make sense even with a low advertising spend. There are so many better places to find this kind of talent.
When you’re in Talent Acquisition, you go where your people are, and classifieds are not where you find VPs and senior-level positions.
Classified Usually Have Job Postings From Smaller Organizations
The second thing that tipped me off to this was that classifieds are typically used by smaller mom-and-pop organizations. Not always, but often. Geebo was the opposite of what I expected. It had lots of jobs from household names like Delta Airlines, GE, Time Warner, and Capital One. In fact, very few jobs I found were from names I didn’t recognize. This was strange because I don’t know many Fortune 100s who advertise on sites like this.
The Problem With Scrapers and Aggregators
Scraping and aggregating is the practice of gathering jobs from external sources and building a web page around that content, usually as a way to sell advertising. Many websites are job aggregators. Indeed is a job aggregator. Not all the jobs are paid advertisements from employers who sign up with Indeed. Some of them are pulled from other sources across the web (Indeed).
Google is the world’s largest aggregator of content, including jobs. You can find all kinds of jobs from everywhere on Google. As long as the website is attributing the content (the job in this case) and linking to it, I see nothing wrong with this practice in itself.
But here’s where it can become a problem. Two people I found said they saw their own jobs posted on Geebo and were worried that they were going to get fired. One of them contacted their HR person and found that their company did not advertise the role and it took them some time to get the posting removed.
The concern here is that Geebo scraped old jobs from other websites that didn’t exist anymore and listed them on their website for people to apply to. In some instances, it appeared that they were jobs that had recently been filled.
And that’s the problem. The company took down the postings from their website and the places they paid to advertise it. But they didn’t know that Geebo had scraped their information from those places and still listed it. This leads job seekers to waste their time applying for jobs that aren’t being recruited.
Geebo Frequently Redirects (Green Flag)
While Geebo does scrape many other websites for jobs, it also redirects you to those sites when they do this practice. I clicked on over 50 jobs and the majority of them redirected me to another career site. Some sent me to big job boards like CareerBuilder or The Muse. Some sent me directly to the employer’s career page on their website with the job listed. Others sent me to smaller job boards and recruitment marketing applications that I didn’t recognize, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t legitimate.
I can see this as both good and bad. If it sends me directly to a company’s career website, that’s a great thing. Some of the jobs I explored did do this. However, many simply sent me to other very well-known job boards like CareerBuilder. It seems silly to use Geebo to find jobs on big job boards when you can go directly to the source, set up a job alert and know that you’re getting accurate, real-time job listings.
Geebo Requires You to Give Your Information to Third Parties (Red Flag)
Not all the jobs redirected me to a company career site or alternative job board. Some of them sent me to this screen seen below where it appears to prompt me to create a profile to apply for this job directly on Geebo. For the most part, the information requested seemed standard, but if you look at the fine print, you start to wonder.
First, I immediately saw at the top that they cannot guarantee that the job is still available. At the bottom, it tells me that after registering, a similar job will be generated for me. This most likely meant one of two things. First, this was a scam designed to obtain my information, or two, don’t ensure their job postings are accurate and refreshed (at least as well as any job board could do).
Again, I’m left questioning the integrity of this website.
But what really bothered me was that you have to agree to their terms and in those terms, it states that they will be selling your information to two other resume databases and that by applying for this job, you also have to accept the terms of those two websites.
Many of us don’t want our sensitive information (all of which is on your resume) posted all over the internet for anyone who pays a subscription to access. This was a huge red flag.
All reputable job and career sites I know of allow you to apply to a single job without posting your resume on a database, especially databases they don’t own. At this point, I stopped the application process to protect my information.
Scammers (Yellow Flag)
Geebo, like any other website, does a terrible job at policing their job ads. You can expect that some job listings are scams to get you to give them money or steal your personal information for identity theft.
I only listed this as a yellow flag, instead of a red flag, because every site seems to be plagued with this. Even the biggest job boards with huge staff levels fall victim to scammers posting fake jobs on their websites. I’ve seen a couple of studies done where people create a fake company and post fake jobs on these platforms and it’s common for 20% of them never to get caught.
I don’t know what Geebo’s scam percentage is specifically, but I’m willing to bet it’s equally as high. One of their navigation buttons is about how to spot scams on their site. That should tell you something. So proceed with caution, like you would with any other third-party job board.
Is Geebo Legit For Jobs
So, is it legit for jobs? Yes, it is legitimate but that doesn’t mean you should use it. Here’s why.
I like that it scrapes jobs and redirects you, sometimes to company career pages directly. But I can do the same thing, better with Google at scale. So it doesn’t make sense to use Geebo for this. Plus, many have questioned the legitimacy of how up-to-date their job listings are.
If the company paid Geebo to list it directly on their site, you can’t just apply. Geebo even says that the job may not be available when you apply. In addition, they require you to give your resume to their affiliates which opens you up to more risk. That was a hard stop for me.
So, yes, Geebo appears to be legitimate. I don’t think they are maliciously trying to scam anyone directly. But I also wouldn’t use it myself or recommend it to my readers and clients. There are simply better ways to find these same jobs.
Is Geebo Legit Conclusion
Geebo is a legitimate website with classifieds including jobs.
Geebo Jobs scrapes the internet for jobs, the majority of them have never been posted directly on Geebo.
Geebo may be a good resource to find jobs as it points you to career websites where you can apply directly for many jobs; however, Google also does this much better.
I wouldn’t apply for jobs directly advertised on Geebo, because to do so, you have to share your personal information with their affiliates.
Is Geebo Legit Recommended Reading
How to Find Jobs I’m Qualified For
Cole Sperry has been a recruiter and resume writer since 2015, working with tens of thousands of job seekers, and hundreds of employers. Today Cole runs a boutique advisory firm consulting with dozens of recruiting firms and is the Managing Editor at OptimCareers.com.
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