There is no point forcing candidates to hand over personal data and subscribe to a mailing list just so they can view content or apply for jobs via your site, according to the founders of job board Job Basket.

Co-founder Andy Constantinou tells Recruiter that Job Basket allows users to opt out of registering their details for future communication when applying for a job via the site, saying: “We’d rather have data that people want us to have than hold our content and our site ransom until they give us their data – because you’re not going to read that email anyway.”

Constantinou said that the number of users who choose not to opt out of registration commonly fluctuates between one in 40 and one in 50.

He also says that he and co-founder Alex McAuley get a lot of positive feedback from users, reasoning that while lots of users like the site, they nonetheless have an aversion to giving their data to it. “I think it’s got that bad name from the top five job boards in the industry,” he says.

Job Basket last week launched forum and seminar solution GuideCast, using free open source database MongoDB.