Speaking to Ray van den Bel about social networking tool, LinkedIn, resulted in a rather interesting discovery on his behlaf, on how the ‘LinkedIn Jobs’ network operates. The results were rather shocking, too… Here’s the full story, from Ray’s perspective…

I noticed that recruiters have to pay a massive fee for advertising their vacancies. Most of the time they spend around 150$- 300$ for a single advertisement.

Somehow I found this to be adisproportionate amount and because I am also the owner of The Open Networkers Movement as well I decided to do something about it.

What most people and recruiters don’t realize is that popular Job-board use content from external resources to fill their Job-board in order to sell their own vacancies. The marketing message is something like this:

‘ …don’t you see other people are doing it as well, so use us too…!’

One such example of the use of external vacancies is the use of the 5 million vacancies which are published on the Simply Hired network. It turned out that these are getting republished on LinkedIn, Myspace and dozens of other job-board without the usual costs!

Next thing, the Open Networkers made themselfves a Job-board, added it to the Simply Hired Network and guess what…. it works! The vacancies are visible all over the internet on many job-boards! And all that for a symbolic fee of 9$. So if you also feel a bit annoyed by those high advertising costs as well, just strike back by adding your vacancy here:

http://jobhunters.jobamatic.com/

The revenues will be used to create additional services for Open Networkers Movement. Our idealism is to freely share in quality online networking.

So in effect - you no longer have to pay $300 to post a job on LinkedIn! Ray has discovered how you can post jobs for a measely $9! But it makes you think - how many other big Web 2.0 sites are ripping off their users?