Where is the best place to advertise your jobs?

When searching for new staff, you have many options for reaching your target audience. However, advertising a job online is by far the most effective and successful method: as well as traditional online job boards such as Indeed, Reed and Total Jobs, there are also social media and specialist niche networks geared to finding the best candidates.

Hiring can be an expensive process, so when looking for new staff you should first take some time to think about the how and when you should post job openings for free and whether to consider some low-cost paid options.

The most common approach is:

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

2.  If you find that you are getting limited results from free sources, next look at paying to advertise.  You can do this through a multi-job board poster like Flat Fee Recruiter or, if you have the volume, go directly to a range 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.  If, after 1-2 months of direct advertising you are still no closer to filling your vacancy (this will probably be about 10-15% of the time) then you 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.

Best 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 almost certainly have some presence on Google, why not use this to your advantage and tell your story?  You may be pleasantly surprised with the results. 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, and 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 TikTok!  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.  Some major boards like Indeed and Adzuna currently allow companies to advertise jobs for free.  However, be aware that these sites change their charging policies all the time. Many are building their traffic by offering free online job posting, but this will inevitably change the more popular they get or the more you use them.

5.  Universal Job Match / Job Centre

Yawning?  Don’t!  Some jobs work wonders on the Job Centre and in some cases this is one of the best places to recruit people for free.  One thing you may want to consider when using the job centre is using 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 resources should generate you between 5-10% of your hires.  You could be generating 80% of your hires for as little as £299.  Also, consider the amount of 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 like FFR, who can do all this for you, for a low cost, really is a no brainer!

7.  General Job Boards

Even if you have a high volume of recruitment requirements, it is always worthwhile speaking to recruitment advertising agencies like ourselves before going directly to the job boards.  However, the fact is you can get some competitive deals when going direct, 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, the chart below covers how much it currently costs to place an advert on Monster, Fish, Jobsite, Total Jobs etc. All prices are subject to VAT. Some of these Job Boards 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 to chose from.  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 make sure find out all you can about them, to minimise the risk of spending huge sums for little return.  A top tip is to first use Google as if you were a candidate:  for example, if you search for “HR Jobs in Leeds” on Google, Personnel Today is not even on the first page, yet this site is supposed to be a specialist HR publication! And if 90% of candidate searches start in Google…

Here are a few examples to give you an idea of how much it will cost to advertise directly 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 and are an increasingly common resource.  The premise is to create your advert and then choose your audience based on a variety of factors, before you then bid and/or set a budget to help 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, whereas Facebook provides the option to delve much more deeply into the behaviour of their members, such as “bought a new car in the last 3 years”.

You can also bid for certain phrases that people will be searching for, e.g. “sales jobs in Leeds”.  How much you spend on these sites is up to you, but we would recommend setting a lower budget to start with and working up from there. If you’re a creative type, consider using pictures or Gifs to really make your adverts stand out.

10. Newspapers / Trade Press

Newspapers and the hard copy press have been facing ever dwindling readership for years, but an advert in print can still occasionally find you that elusive ideal candidate.  Be aware though that they are usually expensive and, unless they also have an online version of their jobs section, it will only be, at best, 24 hours before they’re wrapping fish & chips.

Something else:  Most papers and 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 – there is much less space to make an impact compared to online.

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 because they’re excited by your vacancy.

2.  Writing for the internet means you need to think about SEO; key words, content design and call-to-action are all essential considerations.

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

4.  Jobs adverts that don’t list a salary will generate up to 80% fewer candidates. Sometimes it’s simply not possible to include this, but bear in mind that leaving out this valuable info will reduce your response rate significantly.

5.  Make sure your adverts are legal. It goes without saying that discrimination of any sort is completely unacceptable.

Hopefully we have answered a few of the most common 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 Reed and Indeed, and we have plenty of other informative articles on the best way to advertise a job across our site.

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 might not even be with us!