Who owns your job board and LinkedIn Recruiter accounts?

Part of our complete guide to IT support for recruitment firms.

Ask who in your firm could log in to every job board account tomorrow if the person who set them up left today. In some firms the honest answer is nobody, because the login, the card on file and the verification email all belong to one consultant.

Why these accounts get missed

Offboarding checklists cover email and the CRM, because everyone knows those exist. Job boards and LinkedIn Recruiter get bought by a desk, often with whichever card was to hand, and never make it onto a list that IT can see. Your provider can't revoke an account it doesn't know about.

Picture a consultant who opened a job board account a year and a half ago, using a personal email because their work address wasn't ready yet. They leave on a Friday. On Monday nobody can reset the password, because the reset email goes to an inbox you can't reach. Saved searches, candidate lists and notes can sit inside accounts like this too. If you can't get in, that work is stuck behind someone else's login.

Three ways it goes wrong

The login is a personal email address

Password resets and renewal notices go to someone who no longer works for you and may now work for a competitor. Whoever controls that inbox controls the account.

The renewal card is personal

If a subscription was paid on a consultant's own card, it renews on that card, and you may not be able to change or cancel it without them.

LinkedIn Recruiter seats belong to named users

Each seat is assigned to a person. LinkedIn lets an account administrator reassign a seat to someone else, which is how you take a leaver's seat back, but that only works if your firm has an administrator on the contract. If the only administrator is the person leaving, sort that out before their last day. LinkedIn also publishes limits on licence reassignment and removal, so read them now rather than when you need them.

Keep a register

The fix takes about half an hour. Ask every consultant to list the job boards and tools they log in to, then check that list against your card statements for recurring payments. Make a one page register with a row for every paid or shared account, and record:

• What the account is and what it costs.
• When it renews.
• Which email address is the login.
• Which card pays.
• Who else is an administrator.

Then fix the weak points. Use a role based address on your own domain, such as jobboards@yourfirm.co.uk, rather than a person's inbox. Pay with a company card. Name at least two owners. Where a board supports two step verification, send the codes to a company managed device or authenticator, not one person's personal phone.