Gone are the days where you called up your local recruitment agency to let them know about your latest job opening. The norm now is to advertise your job online. This raises a number of questions about where to post job openings: 

Approximately 300,000 companies advertise jobs online in the UK.

1. Where do you advertise your job?
2. How do you make your job stand out from your competitors?
3. How do you manage your applicants?

For most industries, advertising on a general job board will be the most appropriate. There are always exceptions (IT being a big one – will cover further down). If you work within recruitment, it is likely that you have come across these 11, well-known job boards. The thing is that they aren’t all equal, as you will see later.

Where To Advertise A Job: The Top Job Boards

Indeed

Indeed

Total Jobs

Total Jobs

Telegraph Jobs

Telegraph Jobs

Reed

Reed

Monster

Monster Jobs

Jobsite

Job Site

Jobstoday

Jobs Today

Gumtree

Gumtree Jobs

The Guardian Jobs

Guardian Jobs

Fish4Jobs

Fish4Jobs

CV Library

CV Library

Universal Jobmatch (Jobcentre Plus)

Universal Jobmatch

Are you surprised by any of them?

The top 10 job boards make up around 66% of all jobs advertised. The biggest shock might be that the Guardian doesn’t feature in the top 20 job boards by volume. The most likely reason is that unless you are buying a high volume of adverts with them, they are a prohibitively expensive job posting site to work with.

The list of the top 20 paid and free job boards, with market share, are:

*Hiring People work with these sites – 8 out of the top 10!

Should You Advertise On More Than One Job Listings Site?

I will try to answer this question in an unbiased fashion, as we would naturally want you to advertise your job across multiple sites with us.

Read Should I advertise My Job On More Than One Site?

Certains sites, such as TotalJobs, Reed and Indeed will be visited by a large percentage of job seekers. The issue is that if your job postings are only on one of those job board sites, it is unlikely that all job seekers will be reviewing all sites, reducing your pool of quality applicants.

What About The Quality Of Applicants?

Our experience is that applicants from Universal Jobmatch are generally less qualified candidates than other (paid) sites; Universal Jobmatch offers free job postings for employers, and we include it as part of our packages (it is one of the other job boards your job gets posted to).

The main reason we believe for the lower quality applicant is due to the targets which job seekers have in terms of the number of jobs to apply to a week. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t great applicants through Universal Jobmatch, you might just have to spend more time going through CVs to find potential candidates of a high quality.

IT, Leisure, And Engineering Jobs

Out of the top twenty job sites, there are three sectors which stand out as having industry-specific job sites, with Engineering being the most prominent. So it is advisable to post jobs on those paid and free posting sites, if you have an appropriate job to advertise on one of them. Even though we don’t include them in our standard job advertising packages, if you give us a call, we can put together a bespoke job advertising solution for you.

Making Your Job Posts Standout

There are literally millions of jobs advertised online at any point in time, so how do you get your job postings to stand out? Here are a few ideas:

1. Include detail in your job advert and job description about the job. Be as specific as you can be.
2. Use an accurate job title so your job appears in job alert emails
3. Have above industry pay.
4. Include a greater number of days holiday (or even unlimited holiday).
5. Advertise your job title on multiple locations, including paid (sponsored jobs) and free job boards, job aggregator sites, social media, and your company website.

Read about free job posting sites in our article How Do Free Job Advertisements Stack Up?

Managing Applicants

If you click this link you will find that the average job seeker has to apply to 27 jobs to get an interview, meaning that if you invite 3 people in, you would on average have 81 applicants per position, which is great for you as you will have lots of choices, but it then leads to the question of how do you manage so many applicants? The answer is an applicant tracking system (ATS). Included with our fees is access to our ATS.

An ATS allows you or your hiring manager to:

• Flag applicants who you wish to follow up with
• Email applicants directly (instead of going between different systems)
• Make notes against applicants, including saving them for future openings

Conclusions On Where To Post Jobs

You may have noticed that I haven’t suggested advertising your job directly on your website. For most businesses, unless you are a very well known brand, it is unlikely that you will get enough applicants, so please ignore this comment! For most businesses, advertising your job on the UK’s leading job sites will result in a good number of applicants for your jobs. However, top candidates may visit your career site to find out about your employer brand and employment options, such as do your support remote workers. So, there is value to post a job ad there, even though it may not directly drive more candidates your way.

Happy Recruiting!