Is Job Advertising The Cheapest Way To Recruit
Job advertising costs can mount up quickly, and if you want to find qualified candidates in days to weeks, you probably don’t want to sign a lengthy contract and pay a recruitment agency £20k. Nor do you want to spend hours upon hours uploading your job post to multiple job boards, which is also costly if you go directly to the job board sites themselves.
In this article, we take a look at the recruitment process, focusing on how to hire on a tight recruitment budget, answering questions such as:
- Where Can I Advertise Jobs For Free?
- How Do I Post Job Listings On More Than One Job Board?
- How Do I Attract Job Seekers And The Top Talent?
Where Can I Advertise Jobs For Free?
If your recruitment budget is limited, then it is a no brainer that you will want to investigate free and low-cost advertising possibilities. Hiring success is possible when you are not paying for a job posting, although some advertising routes are more effective than others.
Social Media Sites
Your company’s social media page is an excellent place where you can tell your target audience that you are on the hunt for potential talent. You can create a job post that will appear on your profile page, which can be effective if you build a following consisting of other industry professionals, passionate customers, and even past employees you might want to recruit again.
Top tip for recruiters: Ask your existing employees to share your job posting on their social media pages, to increase exposure and reach. You may want to introduce an employee referral scheme to further incentivise your staff.
For your job posting to become searchable and appear on the social platform’s dedicated job pages, you will need to spend some money for their paid services. However, paying to advertise on LinkedIn Jobs using LinkedIn Recruiter is a worthwhile investment.
The following resources make excellent reading for companies interested in recruiting through social media:
- How To Advertise A Job On Social Media
- Guide To Recruiting With Social Media
- LinkedIn Job Advertising Guide
- How To Advertise A Job On Facebook
Free Job Boards
Posting on free job boards requires an investment of your time, so it costs as many hours as you put into it. Our research and data show that posting on no-cost job boards brings a fraction of the success of their paid equivalents.
The main reason for limited success in finding the right candidates or enough applicants is a result of paid job ads appearing above free and the speed at which no-cost ads disappear from the first page of job listings.
If you wish to explore the effectiveness of free ads further, we recommend reading our Free Job Advertising Review.
How Do I Post Job Listings On More Than One Job board?
Your business will inevitably have costs to advertise and recruit online, but you can keep costs appropriate to your position, recruitment needs, required support, and budget.
Job Posting On General Job Boards
Job posting on general job boards is the best method for finding qualified candidates. Your company can attain massive exposure, and you can advertise to a set daily budget or for a flat fee with a job board reseller.
For most companies, using a job board reseller makes the most sense. You can post job openings to multiple job sites through one portal, saving a considerable amount of time and at significantly lower costs than going individually to each job board.
Your company will also have access to the job board reseller’s Applicant Tracking System. Centralising recruitment with ATS allows recruiters to:
- Automate the posting of jobs and candidate sourcing
- Import and export candidate data
- Screen applicants and search your talent pool database
- Track the recruitment process online and collaborate as a team
- Use admin tools to, for example, schedule interviews and send out rejection or job offer emails
Post your jobs with job board advertising here.
The Best Job Search Sites UK, include:
- Reed
- TotalJobs
- Jobsite
- Monster
- Guardian Jobs
- CV Library
- Jobs Today
- Fish4
- Indeed
- Gumtree
Job Posting On Niche Job Boards
If you need to fill vacancies for jobs that require expert knowledge, industry-specific experience, qualifications, or accreditations, then niche job boards are worth their weight in gold.
Your company can put its jobs in front of qualified candidates actively searching or passively browsing these specialist job boards.
A niche site can also be geographical, so it can be a quicker route to finding the right person if you want to advertise in a region or city.
While you shouldn’t expect to find and hire a candidate in one day, it is worth spending a little more to get your jobs posted on a niche recruitment site if you have a business-critical role.
Top Niche Job Boards UK, Include:
- CW Jobs (IT)
- JobServe (IT)
- WorkingMums (Part-time)
- GAAPweb (Accounting and Finance)
- Guardian Jobs (Public Sector)
- Marketing Week (Marketing)
- Only Marketing Jobs (Marketing)
- Third Sector (Charity)
- Charity Job (Charity)
- Dezeen Jobs (Architecture, Interiors, and Design)
Flat Fee Recruitment
Medium and smaller businesses may not have a dedicated recruitment team on their full-time payroll. If employers do not have in-house hiring expertise, a flat fee recruitment service can be highly beneficial.
Making a wrong hiring choice can be disastrous, and a flat fee recruitment service will help you avoid this by providing the support you need. Their services can include:
- Online recruitment advertising
- Candidate filtering
- Social network and CV database searches
- Telephone screening
- Interview scheduling
How Do I Attract Job Seekers And The Top Talent?
There are several important things to put in place to attract top applicants while managing recruitment costs.
Write Job Descriptions
Job descriptions are essential and should outline the role’s responsibilities and duties. Ideally, your company should have job descriptions on file for each position, which can be used for recruitment, interviews, employee onboarding, and performance appraisals.
It doesn’t need to cost anything to create a description for your jobs. You can use a no-cost job description template to begin, and add in the unique aspects of the role.
For further guidance on writing a job profile, read How To Define What People Do In Their Jobs and Preparing Job Descriptions.
Write An Effective Job Advert
Your job advert will need a job title that applicants may search for on a job site, an introductory sentence promoting the benefits of working for your company, and the job description.
Add an appropriate and relevant list of skills, experience, and qualifications to this. The most successful hiring strategies include adding a salary range to the ad, the job’s location (office or remote), and employee benefits, which can be bonuses but also support for training and career development.
There are no costs for using our job advert templates, so these are a logical place for costs-conscious recruiters to begin.
Job Advertising FAQs
Next, we answer your hiring cost questions.
Which is the cheapest method of recruitment?
Job boards present the most value for money and should accompany recruitment efforts through social networking and your company careers page. For further advice, read How Much Do Recruitment Agencies Charge?
How do you recruit without a budget?
It is best to set a budget to ensure recruiting costs do not get out of control. Flat fee and fixed cost recruitment are excellent options for managing hiring costs.
Is it costly to recruit and hire employees?
It doesn’t have to be costly to recruit and we recommend using a fixed cost recruitment service to advertise across the most popular sites at a fraction of the cost of posting direct.
What is the best way to recruit?
Planning is vital and we recommend exploring the resources and blogs we publish to ensure recruitment is effective and results in hiring the best candidate for the role.
