Luke Elkins.

Sites which charge industry jobseekers a fee for freelancers to see job adverts are rightly despised by all right-thinking workers in the business, given that they simply suck money out of the system while adding nothing of value themselves (given that almost all industry jobs are available on free-to-use social media pages). Sites like Production Base, Production Hive and mandy are best avoided on that basis, not least also that many are used by exploitative employers looking for unpaid workers.

It appears however that there are also now others who are trying to make a fast buck, but this time at the expense of employers. An individual called Luke Elkins in this case who, when employers post their jobs on free sites which they know and trust, simply takes them and reposts them on a page which he seeks to monetise.

The net result is that, when employers wish to close their job advert, they find they can’t effectively do that as the job advert stays live on Elkins‘ site (which they have no control over), resulting in numerous unwanted applications coming in, and of course wasting freelancers’ time and effort, who can also readily find the same adverts elsewhere. When asked to remove the adverts by employers, Elkins simply refuses to.

Elkins is by all accounts also a sometime freelancer in the business. Hopefully employers will remember the name and behaviour when he comes around looking for work, which is unlikely to be in a positive way given the continued inconvenience he foists upon them by what he does. He is clearly not the sharpest tool in the box, given that our industry often operates on reputation spread by word of mouth.

And if you are a new entrant to the industry and you want to see all the available jobs, you only need to visit this page, the largest TV job recruitment site in the UK. It’s where Elkins likes to pay his daily visits to fill his Facebook page, but why not get ahead of the queue and go to the original source as and when they’re actually put up by the employers, instead of second hand and hours later!