Where is the Best Place to Advertise your Jobs?

There are many places where you can advertise, promote and push your jobs out to your target audience.  Advertising your jobs online is still by far the most effective and successful option in today's fight to find the best people.  However, social media sites, employee referral programs and niche networks are also ranked in high regard.

Some of the questions we will be answering in this article are:

First, take a few minutes to think about the how and when you should post job openings for free.  The most common approach is:

1.  Give yourself a couple of weeks to get results from all your free job advertising sources as listed below.

2.  If you are getting limited results from free sources, next look at paying to advertise.  Why not use a Flat Fee Multi job board poster like ourselves or if you have the volume, go directly to a number of job boards.  Either way, this will mean that you can get your jobs advertised across the internet and reach lots of job seekers as cost effectively as possible.  If you have an urgent vacancy, you may run point 1 and 2 at the same time. Your choice!

3.  Finally, if after 1-2 months of direct advertising and you are still no closer to filling your vacancy (probably about 10-15% of the time) then you probably should consider using a specialist recruiter, especially if the role is business critical.  The majority of our clients have reduced their recruitment budget dramatically on over 80% of their hires, so for that occasional, very hard to fill job, paying an agency fee is much more palatable.

So, where are the best places to advertise jobs? Here are our top 10 free and paid places to advertise your jobs.

Top places to advertise your jobs for free

1.  Your Website

Advertising jobs on your own website is often overlooked, especially by smaller businesses.  But, did you know that 84% of candidates will check out your website when applying for jobs?  Your company will have some presence on Google, why not use this to your advantage and tell your story?  You may be really surprised with the results. Oh, and your jobs may even get picked up by a job board aggregator too (more about these in a bit).

2.  Your Intranet/Notice Board/Shop Window/Newsletter

Referrals, word of mouth, employee incentives.. get it all going on!  Shout about the great opportunities internally on all the relevant touch points you have.  The most successful hires come from internal referrals, you probably have plenty of places to communicate with your staff and advertise your jobs for free.

3.  Social Media

Tweet your jobs, publish your jobs on LinkedIn and Facebook and then get your staff to share them, take pictures on Instagram or talk about them on snap chat!  Seek referrals from word of mouth in their social space too.  Find out where do your existing employees spend their time networking and concentrate your efforts on these sites.  People know people like themselves... use this to your advantage!

4.  Free Websites

There are plenty of free job websites.  You can't technically post to a job aggregator, but many will pick your jobs up from your website if you ask them.  However, some sites like Indeed.com and Adzuna.com are currently allowing companies to advertise jobs for free.  These sites and how they charge are changing all the time. Many are building their traffic by offering job posting online for free but this will inevitably change the more popular they get or the more you use them.  Google Jobs is also being launched as we write, which has the potential to change things with free websites too, so watch this space.

5.  Universal Job Match / Job Centre

Yawning?  Don't!  Some jobs work wonders on the job centre and in some cases this one of the best places to recruit people for free.  One thing you may want to consider when using the job centre is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).  A common issue with using the job centre is the volume of time wasters - this is usually because they need to prove they have been looking for work.  An ATS will help you filter these people out quickly and ear mark re-offenders.

Top places to advertise your jobs at the lowest cost first

6.  Flat Fee Recruiter

Well we had to feature on the list, didn't we?  We believe that Flat Fee Recruiter is the next best alternative to free recruitment advertising.  Your free sources should generate you between 5-10% of your hires.  Consider generating 80% of your hires for less than £199.  Also, consider taking away some of the administration required to advertise; writing, posting, dealing with candidate enquiries etc... advertising on both your free and paid for sites will eat into your time... finding a supplier who can do all this for you, for less, really is a no brainer!

7.  General Job Boards

Even if you have volume recruitment requirements, it is always worthwhile speaking to recruitment advertising agencies like ourselves before going directly to the job boards.  However, you can get some competitive deals, especially if you are a new customer or a big name.  We have written stacks of articles on job board advertising (after all it is pretty much all we do).  To give you some idea of costs, please find below how much it will cost to place an advert on Monster, Fish, Jobsite, Total Jobs etc. All prices are subject to VAT. Some of these Job Board will also offer special introductory rates...so don't forget to ask!

8.  Niche Job Boards

In addition to the general job boards listed above, you also have a whole host of niche job boards.  These job boards are usually much more expensive and will attract a lower number of applicants, but they claim to balance this disparity with quality. Just be cautious if you are spending on these boards and find out all you can about them.  Also, it is worth a check on google as if you were a candidate.  For example; I searched for "HR Jobs in Leeds" on google and Personnel Today is not even on the first page, this site is supposed to be a specialist HR publication and 90% of candidate searches start in google...

To give you an idea of how much it will cost to advertise on an industry specific job board:

9.  Pay Per Click Websites (Indeed, Social Media, Google)

PPC job advertising models can be a targeted and successful way to advertise your jobs and generate potential talent.  The premise is to create your advert and then choose your audience based on a variety of factors, you then bid and/or set a budget you want to spend to make your advert appear in front of your chosen audience.  The depth and variety of factors you can choose from depends from site to site.  For example, Indeed will only use job title and location where as on Facebook you can delve into the behaviour of their members such as "has bought a new car in the last 3 years".  You can also bid for certain terms on what people will be searching such as "sales jobs in Leeds".  How much you spend on these sites is up to you, but we would recommend setting a budget at the beginning. Consider using pictures or other creative mediums such as Gifs to really make your adverts stand out too.

10. Newspapers / Trade Press

Although newspapers and hard copy press is a dying breed they still do have their place and in some instances, may just find you that ideal candidate.  Be aware though that they are usually expensive and unless they have an online version of their jobs section, it will only be visible for 24 hours at best.  Something else:  Most papers magazines outsource their online jobs section to third parties, so you may get better results from going directly to the online job board provider.  Also consider how your advert is written - newspaper adverts are not the same for online... read on...

Top tips on the best way to advertise a job vacancy

Writing an advert for online medium is very different from writing an advert for the newspaper.   Check out this list of the best articles on how to write effective job adverts for more information.  We think that the most important things to remember are:

1.  This is a marketing tool, not a full job description.  Your intention is to get people to apply and be excited by your job.

2.  Writing for the internet means you need to have an eye on key words, content, call to action.

3.  People will search based on Job Title - make sure you choose job titles that people know, not random internal ones.

4.  Jobs with salary on will generate 25-30% more candidates - but a bit pointless if you are advertising less than the going rate.

5.  Make sure your adverts are legal.

I hope that we have answered all the questions relating to where is the best place to advertise your jobs, where you can advertise job openings for free, how much it costs to place an advert on sites like monster and what is the best way to advertise a job?

If you would like to chat about one of your vacancies and where is the best place to advertise it, then please get in touch, we can give you advice on where the best place to advertise this job would be & it may not be with us!