Does free job advertising really work or are you just wasting time, leaving your business understaffed and outgunned?

When you advertise a job for free, you have a hiring strategy that is only worthwhile and effective if the free job advertising site has a high volume of qualified candidates AND gives your free job advert visibility for a sufficient amount of time.

Hiring People completed a free job advertising review to assess if job boards can advertise jobs for free, meet these two criteria, and produce qualified candidates. Using data collected from 1,000s of paid and free job advertising posts, the analysis delivered remarkable insights that all recruiters, hiring managers, and small and medium-sized companies should review.

The first and possibly most crucial statistic is the average number of applications per site. A free job advert averages 0.09 applications per job posting. In comparison, when you pay to advertise a job online, each post generates 8.07 applications, 88 times greater than advertising a job for free.

The data for advertising a job suggests that when you advertise jobs for free, you will need to post your job on ten sites to get one qualified applicant. Only three free sites achieved an applicant rate of over 0.15; Adzuna, Jobs4a, and Tip Top Job.

The likelihood of securing a new employee is low when you advertise a job for free, even on well-known job boards such as Glassdoor, Jooble, JobRapido, and Trovit.

It is not a case that these job boards are bad; it is just that they are very good at ensuring paid job adverts have maximum visibility with their audience.

When Should You Use Free Job Advertising?

If you need to advertise job vacancies, have plenty of free time, and a position that doesn’t need urgently filling, you could advertise a job for free in the UK and find a suitable employee. However, those hours can quickly get used up when factoring in the time it takes to create a new account with each free job board, upload your job description, and revisit each site to manage applications and follow-up tasks.

When Should You Use Paid Job Advertising?

Paid job advertising is especially valuable when seeking to:

• Hire for senior and specialised roles (senior executives, developers, engineers, etc.)
• Hire local talent
• Run an ongoing recruitment campaign, hiring more than one individual
• Hire urgently

To advertise a job locally, nationally, or internationally, a manual job posting approach can quickly eat through your available time and recruitment budget. To overcome these challenges, you can use a job board reseller (multi-job poster) and their Applicant Tracking System.

Job board resellers and ATS let you post a job online in a few minutes and automatically gain visibility across multiple job sites. You can then manage job applications from one place, contacting candidates with email templates and scheduling interviews.

Frequently Asked Questions