Terms of service

What this site is

Tree House Jobs connects people looking for work with local businesses hiring, and lists local service businesses in a directory. We provide the place where those listings meet. We are not an employer, an employment agency, or a party to anything you agree with someone you meet here.

We do not screen employers, job seekers or businesses. We do not verify that a job is real, that a company is legitimate, or that a resume is accurate. Use the same judgement you would use answering any advert.

Your account

You must be 18 or older, or old enough to work legally where you live with the permissions your state requires. One account per person. Keep your password to yourself — anything done through your account is treated as done by you.

Give us real information. An account opened under a false name, a business that does not exist, or contact details that are not yours may be suspended without notice.

What you post

You keep ownership of everything you upload. By posting it here you give us permission to store it, show it to other users of the site, and display it in search results — nothing more.

Everything you post must meet these rules:

• It is truthful. No invented employers, qualifications, pay rates or openings.

• It is yours to post, or you have permission. No copyrighted photos, video, music or text belonging to someone else.

• It contains nothing sexual, violent, hateful or otherwise obscene.

• It is not spam, a scam, a chain letter, or an advert for something other than the job or business it belongs to.

• It does not expose anyone else's private information — no other person's face, phone number or address without their say-so.

Hiring lawfully

If you post a job here, you are responsible for following the employment laws that apply to you — federal, state and local. We are not your legal adviser and we do not check your postings against the law for you.

In particular, do not discriminate. Hiring decisions, and the wording of the advert itself, must not be based on race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, military or veteran status, or genetic information.

That covers the advert as much as the decision. A post may not say or imply that any of those groups need not apply — no age limits, no “young and energetic team”, no asking for a photograph, and no requirement that has nothing to do with doing the job.

Ask for what the work actually requires: the skills, the licenses, the hours, the physical tasks if there genuinely are any. If a requirement would rule out a protected group and is not truly necessary for the role, leave it out.

Postings that break this are removed, and accounts that do it repeatedly are closed.

What you are promising when you post a job

Posting a job here is you telling us three things, and we rely on them:

• You have authority to recruit for the business named in the listing. You own it, work for it, or it has appointed you to hire on its behalf. You are not advertising under the name of a company you have no connection to.

• The listing is genuine. It is a real position, actually open when you post it and still open each time you renew it, on the pay, hours and terms you will actually offer.

• What you have told us about the business is accurate — its name, address, telephone number and website describe a business that really operates.

These are warranties, not intentions. If one of them stops being true, take the listing down rather than letting it run.

Never charge a candidate

You may not ask anyone to pay you anything in order to be considered for work, at any stage.

That covers a fee to apply, to interview, to be screened or background-checked, to be trained, or to obtain a uniform, tools, equipment, software, a certification or a starter kit — and any payment as a condition of being hired or of starting.

You may not ask a candidate to buy from you, to invest, to pay a deposit, or to receive or move money on your behalf.

Do not ask for bank account numbers, card details or a Social Security number through this site. Payroll details belong at the point of hire, in your own systems, after a real offer.

Asking a job seeker for money is the commonest shape a hiring scam takes, and the people it works on are the ones who can least afford it. There is no exception to this rule and no warning for breaking it.

What you may do with a candidate's information

A resume on the Resume Board is somebody's name, home address, telephone number, work history and often their face. They published it to be considered for a job, and that is the only thing it is for.

You may use it to consider that person for a position at the business on your account, and to contact them about it. Everything else is prohibited. In particular, you may not:

• Scrape, crawl, harvest or extract resume data by any automated means.

• Copy, download, print or store resumes beyond what you need to consider somebody for a role you are actually filling, or keep them once you are not.

• Sell, licence, rent, publish, share or otherwise pass resume data to anyone outside your business.

• Use it for marketing, advertising or any sales approach.

• Use it for lead generation, or to recruit on behalf of another company, including as a staffing agency, recruiter or placement service.

• Use it for identity verification, credit, insurance, tenancy or background-data services.

• Combine it with data from anywhere else, or contribute it to any aggregated or enriched dataset.

• Build, populate or maintain any separate database, list, index or directory of Resume Board users.

You must not use anything you find here to make a decision on a basis the hiring rules above forbid.

This is enforced and not merely stated. Every resume you open is recorded against your account, there is a limit on how many you may open in a day, and we act on a pattern that looks like collecting rather than hiring. Breaking this section ends your access to the Resume Board immediately, and your account with it.

A candidate's photograph and video

A written resume hides most of what the law says you may not hire on. A photograph and a video do not — they show age, race, disability, pregnancy and more, all at once. Job seekers here are invited to add both, so what may be done with them is worth saying plainly rather than leaving to the general rule above.

They are part of the resume and carry the same single permitted use: deciding whether to consider that person for a job at your business, and talking to them about it. They may not be downloaded, kept, circulated beyond the people making that decision, published, or used in any other way.

You may not use an applicant's photograph, video, voice, appearance, accent, name, or anything else about them that a photograph or video reveals as a basis for any decision the discrimination rules above forbid.

A candidate who supplies neither is not to be treated as having supplied less. Both are optional here by design, and choosing to leave them off is not a fact about a candidate you may act on.

If your hiring causes a claim

If somebody brings a claim against us arising from what you did as an employer, it is yours to answer. You will defend us against it and cover the resulting losses, damages, judgments, settlements and reasonable legal costs.

That covers claims arising from your job advertisement and anything in it; your interviewing, screening, hiring and employment decisions; discrimination or harassment; how you handled a candidate's personal information; any fee you charged or attempted to charge a candidate; and any fraud or misrepresentation on your part.

We will tell you promptly about any claim we ask you to cover, and give you the conduct of it. You may not agree a settlement that admits fault on our behalf, or that binds us to anything, without our written agreement.

This section outlives your account: closing it does not end an obligation that had already arisen.

Your photo and video are yours to skip

A photo and a short video are offered on a resume because some people find them useful. Both are entirely optional, and so is either one without the other.

Leaving them out does not hide you. It has no effect on whether employers find your resume, and none on where you appear in their results — employer search matches on your fields of work, your keywords and your location, and orders by how recently you updated your resume. Nothing in it looks at whether you uploaded a photo or a video.

You can add either later, or remove either at any time, and your resume stays exactly as findable as it was.

False listings and spam

Posting a job that does not exist, inventing pay or benefits to attract applicants, or using a listing to collect personal details for any other purpose is grounds for immediate removal and a permanent ban.

The same applies to resumes: fabricated employment history, qualifications you do not hold, or references who have not agreed to be listed.

Do not use the site to send unsolicited sales messages to employers or job seekers.

Adult and inappropriate content

No sexual or pornographic material, nudity, graphic violence, or content promoting hatred or harm against any group or person. This applies to photos, video, written descriptions and profile details alike.

Uploads may be reviewed. Anything that breaks these rules is removed, and serious cases are reported to the appropriate authorities.

Copyright

Only upload photos and video you took, or that you have written permission to use. Stock imagery, another company's marketing material, music you do not hold a licence for, and text copied from another listing are all off limits.

If you believe something here infringes your copyright, contact us with a description of the work and where it appears and we will investigate and remove it where appropriate.

Removing content, and suspending accounts while we look into them

We may remove any listing, resume, photo or video, and suspend or close any account, at our discretion and without notice, when we believe these terms have been broken.

Where we suspect fraud, impersonation, or misuse of candidates' information, we may suspend an account immediately and keep it suspended while we investigate — before reaching a conclusion, and without waiting for the account holder's answer.

That is deliberate rather than a last resort. The harm from a fraudulent listing or a harvested resume is done in the hours an investigation takes, and a suspension can be undone where that harm cannot. We will tell you what we are looking at, we will look at it promptly, and if we are wrong we will restore the account and say so.

You can delete your own content or close your account at any time. Applications you have already sent stay with the employer who received them.

No guarantees

We do not promise that you will find work, find a candidate, or find a business. We do not promise the site will always be available or free of errors.

The site is provided as-is. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for losses arising from your use of it, from anything another user posts, or from any arrangement you enter into with someone you meet here.

Disputes, arbitration, and the class action waiver

Disputes between you and Tree House Jobs are resolved by individual binding arbitration rather than in court, and both of us give up the right to a jury trial and to take part in a class action. That agreement is part of these terms and is set out in full at treehousejobs.com/arbitration.

It is not buried in here because it is the part that takes something away. Everybody is shown it when they open an account and has to agree to it separately.

You have 30 days from first accepting it to opt out, in writing, without any effect on your account. Small claims court, complaints to government agencies, and emergency court orders are all still open to you either way, and the agreement binds us on the same terms it binds you.

Changes

We may update these terms. If we make a significant change we will say so on the site. Continuing to use Tree House Jobs after a change means you accept the updated terms.