Most job board CEOs get nervous when you discuss monetization. I have often heard that job searches should be free and that we should never charge job seekers.

It is a complex topic, so I would like to leave the discussion out of this post – I think there could be good reasons to charge for a service, and plenty of paid job boards have been doing well. 

I have to be completely honest. My career started at a B2C monetizing job board called Experteer two decades ago, so I will try to be unbiased. However, spending so much time at this company has impacted how I see this topic. Back then, I learned that there are many reasons why traditional job boards fail, and you can provide a lot of value in addition to what a simple aggregator would do.

However, building value usually costs effort and money, so it is perfectly fine to charge job seekers if you can provide value where traditional aggregators fail. 

One last word on that philosophical topic. Just because job boards and aggregators don’t charge directly to job seekers does not mean that their business models are not built in a way that job seekers pay indirectly. 

Yes, I am talking about the CPC/CPA monetization. While CPC and CPA models help job boards and aggregators generate revenue, they often lead to a poor experience for job seekers. In the CPC model, job boards may prioritize high-paying clicks over job relevance, resulting in clickbait titles, expired listings, and repetitive exposure to the same jobs. Redirect loops can also make the application process frustrating and inefficient. On the CPA side, job seekers often face forced account creation, confusing multi-step application flows, and privacy concerns as boards attempt to track applications. Both models can ultimately misalign incentives, leading to a user experience that favors monetization over transparency, quality, and ease of use.

Enough theory, let’s get to the topic. 

Intro to paid job boards

Many startups and failed businesses have probably tried to monetize job seekers, so you are welcome to disagree with the following statement. 

For me, the OG of paid job boards was The Ladders.

In its early years (2006–2010), the company pursued a highly specialized “candidate‑pays” model aimed at experienced professionals seeking six-figure roles. The Ladders curated only those positions offering annual salaries of $100,000 or more. Unlike generalist boards, it hand-screens job postings to maintain an exclusive roster of high-end opportunities.

Whereas most job sites earned revenue by charging employers, The Ladders flipped the script. It charged job seekers a monthly subscription fee for full access to its premium listings, résumé tools, and career resources. Meanwhile, recruiters and companies purchased licenses to mine its vetted résumé database of affluent candidates.

You can debate whether this is valuable, but it was a worthwhile product for many people. A vast team manually curated jobs from company career pages. Building this before AI was expensive. 

The problem with The Ladders was that, as they wanted to scale the business, they abandoned their promise of $100K+ jobs and just started generic scraping. They used the jobs as massive upsell hooks to force job seekers into a useless subscription. 

By abandoning its original $100 K-plus niche and opening the site to lower-paid roles, The Ladders diluted the exclusivity that attracted high-end professionals, then compounded the damage with misleading listings, aggressive billing practices, and poor customer service. A class‑action lawsuit over unvetted jobs and hard-to-cancel subscriptions further eroded trust. At the same time, internal mismanagement and a tarnished reputation drove users to free competitors like LinkedIn and Indeed. Despite rebranding efforts and expanded free content, Ladders never fully recovered the premium appeal that made it a standout in its early years.

When is it okay to charge job seekers?

Returning to the original topic, it is okay to charge job seekers if you are going to provide value that traditional job boards and aggregators do not offer. 

So, what are good use cases to consider charging job seekers for?

Long-tail content

Providing specific long-tail content that job seekers cannot find everywhere is a value proposition that can be monetized. Scraping beyond ATS platforms becomes expensive and complex, so there is a huge opportunity to serve content that job seekers cannot easily find on other sites. Providing jobs from SMBs in specific markets can be difficult, as SMBs don’t use ATS platforms. Thus, scraping, normalizing, and enriching these jobs can be a real pain. 

Up-to-date content

In a world where job supply is strictly less than job demand, being able to apply to jobs first is a huge advantage. Job boards that can guarantee content freshness and deliver these jobs to matching candidates at a better rate have a unique value proposition. You have to understand that most job scraping happens 1-2 times per day, so the jobs from the ATS get indexed with a delay. 

Advanced filtering/niche

Aggregating and filtering jobs from a specific niche is a strategic advantage only for people who want to work in this industry.

An example I want to give is AI jobs.

Some people want to work in a 100% AI company building AI products. This is their definition of AI jobs. Others want to work for companies utilizing AI to develop products and services. You are working with the same technology, but in different ways. Being able to filter out jobs based on these specific cases: industry, skills, niche, etc, is a big thing and sufficient to build 

RemoteRocketship is a great example, capitalizing on the strong trend of people looking for remote jobs and willing to pay for it. Remote filters on most aggregators are broken and don't work properly, as the data is usually just mapped, not actually extracted from the job ad page.

However, there are others: ExecThread, for example, in the US, provides executive jobs that are hard to find or not posted on job boards. This was quite successful in the past with The Ladders, before they went on and destroyed their model. 

Jobleads started as a competitor to Experteer back in 2007 with more or less the same value proposition. Today, they have extended their value proposition beyond job curation and offer a digital coaching service, access to a Headhunter network (big thing in Germany) and more advanced job alerts.

Additional metadata for jobs

Getting structured data out of jobs and allowing people to filter jobs by this data is a very valuable asset. In the case of remote employment, finding truly 100% remote jobs without any visa requirements is hard. So, the job boards that focus on building AI models to extract, validate, and serve the data back to job seekers have a sufficient value proposition to charge them. 

Additional data on employers

Sometimes, job seekers need more information about the employer to make their decisions. This information can include financial data, company culture, salary, career growth, benefits, reviews, culture proxies, etc. A significant advantage is aggregating this information from different sources, normalizing it, and presenting it to the job seeker in an easy way to navigate and interact with.  

Apply automation / Apply tracking.

The application part of the job search takes a lot of time and has an objectively painful UX. You have a business case if you can deliver the applications to the ATS directly, saving the candidate time and helping them optimize the application. You can extend the concept and provide tools that streamline the job-search process, such as centralized application management, reminders, tracking follow-ups, and scheduling. Reducing administrative overhead for job seekers is attractive enough to justify a fee and was one of the foundations of TealHQ’s business model. 

Advanced analytics and market data

This can be a nice upsell functionality if you can provide information like typical salary benchmarks for the role or benchmarks of profiles that have already been hired for similar jobs (don’t ask me how to do that; I am afraid of even writing the words “LinkedIn” and “scraping” in one sentence).  

Access to Hidden Jobs

Offering early or exclusive access to unpublished or hidden opportunities from select employers or recruiting partners, such as those that haven’t publicly advertised positions, is a clear value proposition worth charging for. The question is - how? Every market is different, but some ideas to get you started are as follows: find a way to motivate people to share open jobs their company is hiring for, but they are not published anywhere. 

Curated Employer Matching

Providing an intelligent matching engine that proactively recommends employers or roles that align precisely with candidates’ career goals, values, or work styles, beyond basic skill matching, can justify a paid premium. This requires a lot of investment to gather data and already touches some of the suggestions above, but it is worth mentioning. 

SEO Implications

A few thoughts on organic traffic performance for job boards utilizing these tactics.

Organic search traffic from Google is crucial for job boards because it connects employers and candidates when they’re actively seeking opportunities. By ranking highly for relevant keywords, a job board can capture a steady stream of qualified job seekers without the continuous ad spend paid channels require. 

Since most candidates begin their job search on Google, appearing prominently in organic results builds trust and credibility, increases click-through rates, and drives consistent, long-term growth. 

Strong SEO reduces acquisition costs and positions the job board as a go-to resource. It ensures that job seekers find your listings for their next role.

If you put your job boards behind a paywall, you will most likely fail to get organic traffic from Google Jobs. On the one hand, you need to have the job posting schema on the job page, so if you add the schema, the job content should also be visible, which goes against the goal. 

You can only put a small part of your job inventory behind the paywall and submit the “free” jobs to Google. 

The impact of a paywall on your search pages is not so bad, as long as you follow some basic rules, like not having too many paywalled jobs on a search page. RemoteRocketShip's implementation of their signup hooks is excellent:

In summary, if you are operating a paid b2c job board, you are constantly going to have to balance between pushing your upsell flows and pissing off Google with bad user experience. It is not easy; if you fail, you must acquire job seekers using paid traffic. Doing so will reduce your ROI on each acquired user, so be mindful.  

One way to offset the negative impact of paywalls is to invest in more traditional content or programmatic SEO. 

Using your job board to sell products on an affiliate basis

Another form of monetization is selling third-party job seeker services on your job board via your traffic-generating assets – job ad pages, search pages, email alerts, and apply flow. Here is an example of 4dayweek promoting JobCopilot.

In this case, I strongly urge you to evaluate these tools yourself and ensure their value proposition is excellent. A good test is – if you were looking for a job, would you pay for this? 

There are plenty of complimentary services that job seekers can find interesting:

• Resume / CV review
• Career Coaching
• Interview Coaching
• AI-apply and apply automation tools
• Salary negotiation

But again, be careful – pushing the wrong product can kill your brand, and you can lose the trust of your audience. 

Indeed's Entry into Job Seeker Monetization

In the section above, I showed you good examples of how to monetize job seekers. It is funny that as I was writing this article, Indeed, one of all companies, decided to launch a paid product for job seekers in Canada.

Here is what Indeed plans on charging job seekers for:

• Mark your application as a top choice up to 3 times per month? No one will care about this.
• Discover roles I am an excellent match for – isn’t this what your core value proposition as a job board is supposed to be?
• How do I compare to other applicants? LinkedIn was built years ago; we know this feature is not the most used.
• Track which employers have viewed my profile and application. Without additional information, this could mean anything. It is low-substance and will confuse people and give false hopes.

Given their conversion and historical data, Indeed Premium's value proposition is disappointing compared to what they could have built for job seekers.

Don't be like Indeed. This product will fail miserably.

Summary – When is it ok to charge job seekers?

Ultimately, charging job seekers only makes sense when you deliver unique, hard-to-find value, whether that’s truly fresh, long-tail listings from SMBs, laser-targeted niche roles, enriched metadata and employer insights, streamlined application workflows, or early access to hidden opportunities. By thoughtfully investing in curation, automation, analytics, and exclusive matching, paid job boards can justify their fees while avoiding the pitfalls of generic CPC/CPA models. At the same time, maintaining organic visibility through transparent content, careful and controlled use of paywalls, and adherence to Google guidelines is essential to capture the audience you plan on charging.