Recruiter gets a reality check after suggesting people should pay a small fee to apply for jobs

Every time a job position opens up, countless job aspirants apply for it. As job applications pile up, recruiters weed out the incompetent ones from the deserving candidates. But Mike Cuthriell, the CEO of an Arizona-based cannabis company called Grow Sciences, has figured out a way to sort the qualifying candidates from the rest. However, his proposed method has irked the LinkedIn community, as many people collectively considered his suggestion completely unethical.

Cuthriell recently dropped a controversial post on his LinkedIn account, which mostly got negative responses from working professionals. The CEO wrote, "Am I insensitive to the world if I think people should pay a small fee ($20?) to apply for a job as a means to prevent an overwhelming quantity of underqualified or mismatched submissions?" He later edited the post and added how he presented this idea as a "thought exercise and it's not a practice or a consideration."

"The fee will guarantee an in-person interview, but not the job. The fee could be $1 and is not a means of generating income for the company. To those who took a moment to contemplate the question and answer productively and professionally thanks. Exchange ideas and avoid the vitriol," Cuthriell's post concluded. Several people who came across his post accused Cuthriell of solely attempting to extract more profit from job seekers where paying a certain sum only lands them an interview and nothing more.

Robert Baker, a sales operations executive, wrote under Cuthriell's LinkedIn post, "But you are proposing a way to generate money for the company. It's bad enough that you have to pay application fees for homes and school, now you want to add it to finding a job because you're afraid you might have too many people apply? Most companies would kill to have more than enough candidates for a position." Cuthriell responded to the comment by narrating a bit of his past struggles with landing a job.

"Unfortunately, it appears the comment section is not the place to move into the next stage of a thought experiment where we could explore the merits of various remarks, so I'll refrain myself. I will only add that the fee is meant to self-govern, meaning, unqualified candidates would not apply because they know they won't get the job and therefore, won't pay the fee. Been out of work and lived paycheck to paycheck and comp has been 100% variable for a decade due to being an owner/founder. When there's profit, I eat. When there's a loss, I scramble. Invested many of my limited dollars and thousands of hours trying to make it on my own because it motivated me. Many risks, seeking rewards," the CEO of Growth Sciences responded.

The screenshot of the original LinkedIn post was shared on Reddit by u/bdcourage, where it received almost equal amounts of backlash from the community. The title above the screenshot aptly read: "I think this wins the prize for 'most out-of-touch' statement by a hiring manager." u/topfuckr sarcastically commented, "Sure, we'll pay $20 to apply if he is paying $30 for every application he rejects plus an hourly rate if interviews are involved. So yes, he's being very insensitive by expecting to get paid for his time and effort. While not offering anything in return for the time and effort of the rejected applicants." u/git0ffmylawnm8 added, "LinkedIn should implement the clown emoji as a reaction to how much of a circus it's become."

u/rosanymphae wrote, "Go ahead and implement an application fee. You'll get very few responses, and those who do are the desperate ones who aren't getting hired for various reasons, like qualifications, bad interviewing, etc. Then he'll whine about how few qualified applicants there are." u/BoredGombeen quipped, "If that's the case, I want $20 every time I respond to a message from a recruiter that sends me a job so vastly far away from my skillset. That might help them learn to target the right people not just scattergun everybody in the general field."