1 min read

Preventing job application spam

As our recruitment system gets more and more popular, and thousands of jobs are being posted using HR Partner, we have become aware that some of our customers are experiencing abusive behavior from spam bots, with hundreds of fake applications being constantly submitted to them resulting in wasted time and energy to filter out and remove them.

To this end, we have been investigating ways to minimize the impact of this sort of thing happening, and have decided to incorporate Google's reCAPTCHA service to our job boards as an option.

If you now go to Recruitment -> Configure -> Job Board, you will notice a new option towards the bottom of the screen asking if you want to turn on reCAPTCHA for your job board.

Note that this change turns on reCAPTCHA globally for ALL your job listings you currently have.

You can also set the strength of the reCAPTCHA testing, ranging from virtually no checking at all (meaning that spam bots will always get through) right up to extremely strict checking (which will mean a lot of legitimate users will also not get through).

We recommend a setting somewhere between half way and 2/3rds of the way.  You will need to experiment a little to find the correct threshold to weed out false applications from legitimate ones.