Posting A Job On One Of The Top 10 Job Boards In The UK
Do you know which are the top 10 job sites in the UK? Should you be advertising on them all? Or just one? The top 10 job sites in the UK by the number of job adverts placed are:
| Rank | Job Boards UK | Percentage of Jobs Advertised |
| 1 | Jobcentre Plus* | 13.29% |
| 2 | LinkedIn* | 9.21% |
| 3 | NewsQuest Group (any of their newspapers) | 8.23% |
| 4 | Indeed* | 7.30% |
| 5 | Reed* | 5.76% |
| 6 | The Telegraph Jobs* | 5.56% |
| 7 | Total Jobs* | 5.43% |
| 8 | Regional Engineering Jobs | 4.27% |
| 9 | Cv Library* | 3.54% |
| 10 | Fish4Jobs* | 3.52% |
*Hiring People work with these sites – 8 out of the top 10!
Writing a job description?
We have produced a template to help you create the perfect job profile. We can also send you job descriptions, just enter the job title required and we will share.
What would you like?
Are you surprised by any of the UK job posting sites listed? Unless you are in the Engineering space, that is one career advice and job hunting site which you might not have come across previously. We realised that The Telegraph was a respected site, but until doing this research, we hadn’t appreciated the size (hence why we now work with them in our Corporate Job Advertising Package).
Where To Place Your Job Ad
Two key points which you should be mindful of before deciding which UK job sites sites to place your job advert on:
- What type of position are you advertising? Only advertising a senior role on Jobcentre Plus is unlikely to yield many (if any) appropriate applications. It is the wrong online employment site for senior roles, with job seekers more likely to be on niche and specialised job boards.
- Cost. If you go directly to a job board such as CV Library, you can easily spend £400 on one job advertisements site. Does that make financial sense? Especially when you can advertise job postings on 7 of the top 10 for only £329?
If you are still set on only working with one of the leading sites, you might want to consider the following:
- Target demographic. If you are recruiting for an accountant, advertising on an engineering job board is unlikely to be wise! The best UK job boards are only so if they are relevant to your job market and candidate job searches.
- Size of site; you can easily spend a similar amount on fairly small sites in terms of website visitors and the number of jobs advertised.
- Cost. Prices range from free to over £400 for placing a single advert on a job site (If you are considering free and paid options, there is a good reason why you wouldn’t want to work with just a free site).
Read our article on how free advertising for jobs stack up.
Free Job sites And Job Boards
Everyone loves something that is free, but there is a problem with free sites. They generally don’t get much website traffic, meaning that you won’t get many applicants from your job listings.
To give an idea of the significance of that, only 3% of all of our applicants come from JobCentre Plus/Universal Job Match.
The old saying goes, you get what you pay for. For jobs advertised in London, especially warehouse work, you may find that the applicants you get from the likes of JobCentre Plus are sufficient for your needs. The reality is that under 20% of the population is London based, with most jobs not being warehouse work, meaning that you are unlikely to get sufficient applicants from a free site.
Which Site(s) Should You Work With?
If you want to attract as many applications as possible, working with multiple sites is your best option and we discuss How to Advertise a Job in this post.
If you are set on working with just one job listings site, it would be reasonable to assume that any of the non-specialist sites in the top 10 best job boards would be appropriate. A lot of the best job sites run promotions for advertising your first job with them, which, from experience are generally half the rate card rate; if you are advertising the same role often, trying it over different sites to establish which works best for you might be a good starting point.
With that in mind though, we definitely see seasonable differences, along with the number of applicants in the market being down slightly from a year ago. To get a fair comparison, test the same job ads out on multiple sites at once.
Indeed and LinkedIn are different from other job boards and recruitment agencies. They work on a pay per click or pay per application basis, meaning that everytime you get a click or application from job seekers, you pay; if you don’t get any clicks through to your advert, there isn’t a cost to you.
Multisite Job Posters
For a lot of small to medium sized businesses though, as soon as you decide that you wish to work with more than one site, the costs become prohibitive; it is unlikely that you will be receiving much of a discount off the headline price when you post jobs. Another couple of challenges you will face is having to work with multiple account managers, along with different systems to manage your applications from job seekers.
Multisite job advertising agencies remove these challenges. You have a single point of contact, the cost is extremely competitive compared with going directly to job boards and you are provided with a single platform to manage your job search engine and CVs. What is there not to like?
