Paying to find work: what is lawful, what is not, and the five pound trial that becomes six hundred a year

7 minute read · Updated 2026-09-23

Somebody out of work, applying for the fortieth time that month, sees an advertisement promising that a service will do the applying for them. It costs 4.99 for seven days. That is less than a sandwich and a coffee, and after six weeks of silence it is a very easy thing to click.

Seven days later it becomes 49.99 every month, and it keeps going until somebody notices and cancels. That is six hundred pounds a year, taken from the bank account of somebody who has no wages coming in.

It is not a scam in the sense that the money disappears and nobody answers the telephone. The renewal is disclosed, the cancellation route works, the terms say what they say. It is worse than that in one way and better in another: it is legal, disclosed, and designed around how tired people read.

This page is the two minute version of how to tell the three kinds apart.

1. The rule that matters most, and almost nobody is told

An employment agency may not charge a work seeker a fee for finding them work, or for trying to. Not a registration fee, not an introduction fee, not a fee to be put on a list, not a fee to be told about jobs. Section 6 of the Employment Agencies Act 1973, reinforced by regulation 5 of the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003.

It is a criminal offence, enforced by the Fair Work Agency. It is not a guideline and it cannot be agreed away, so a term in somebody's conditions saying you consented to it is worth nothing.

There are narrow exceptions, and they are genuinely narrow: certain entertainment and modelling work, where a fee may be charged only under conditions set out in the regulations, including a cooling off period and a ban on making work finding conditional on buying anything.

2. So how do paid services exist at all?

Because not everything sold to a job seeker is work finding. Regulation 26 allows an agency to charge for services other than finding work, things like writing a CV or training, but it puts conditions on it that are worth knowing, because they are exactly the conditions a bad operator breaks:

The other service must be genuinely separate from finding you work. Nobody may make getting work conditional on buying it.
There must be a separate written agreement for it, setting out what it is and what it costs.
You must be able to cancel it without penalty, with a notice period of no more than 28 days.
And an agency that also finds you work may not withhold or delay your wages because you have not paid for something else.

A CV writing service, sold on its own, cancellable, that does not pretend to get you a job, is lawful. Whether it is worth the money is a different question, and the answer is usually that a free afternoon and a good guide gets you most of the way.

3. The shape to watch for

The thing that catches people is not any single term. It is the combination, and once you have seen it once you never miss it again:

A small first payment with a short life. Four or five pounds, seven days. Small enough not to think about, short enough that the real price arrives before anything has been proved.
Automatic conversion to a much larger recurring charge. Ten times the trial price is normal in this shape.
The renewal date anchored to your sign up day, not to a calendar month, so it arrives on a date you have no reason to remember.
No refund for the current period once it has started.
A help centre whose main articles are all about billing, renewal and cancellation. That is the tell. When a company's support pages are mostly about how to stop paying, it is because that is what people are writing in about.

4. What you can do if it has already happened

Cancel first, argue second. Stop the next charge before you do anything else, and keep the confirmation.
You may have a 14 day right to cancel and get your money back. Most contracts made online are distance contracts, and the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give you 14 days from the day you agreed, with a refund within 14 days of telling them. If you asked for the service to start immediately they can charge you for the part you used, but "no refunds for the current period" does not override that right within the first fourteen days.
If it was taken by direct debit, the Direct Debit Guarantee gives you an immediate refund from your bank for a payment taken in error. If it was a card subscription, ask your bank about a chargeback, and note that you can also tell your bank to stop future payments on a continuous payment authority: they must act on that even if the company says otherwise.
If the service was actually finding you work, and you were charged for it, that is section 6 territory. Report it to the Fair Work Agency, which took the employment agency standards work over from the old inspectorate. Reporting is free and you can do it about a company you no longer deal with.

5. What this site does, so you can hold us to it

We are an employment agency as well as a job board, so the rule above applies to us and not only to other people.

Work seekers pay us nothing, ever. Not to apply, not to register, not to be told about a job, not for a CV, not for a card, not for anything. There is no premium tier, there is no upgrade, and there is nothing to cancel because there is nothing to start.
We do not hold a card for you, because we never take a payment from you, so there is no stored payment method to renew against.
Everything on this site that helps you get work is free to everybody, including people who never apply for anything here.
Employers pay for adverts. That is the whole business model and it is on one page with the prices printed on it.

If anybody contacts you claiming to be us and asks you for money, for a card number, or for a payment to release a job, it is not us. Staying safe has what a real message from us looks like, and we would rather hear about it twice than not at all.

The two minute test

Before you type a card number into anything connected with getting a job, ask three questions:

Is what I am buying actually finding me work? If yes, and they are an agency, they may not charge you.
What is the price after the trial, and on what date? If that is hard to find in under a minute, that is the answer.
How do I stop it, and how long does that take? If the help centre's most prominent articles are about cancelling, other people have already found out.

Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here is about any one company. It is the shape, and the shape turns up under a new name every year. If you have been caught by one, you were not careless: it was built to work on somebody who is tired and worried, and that is most people looking for work.