Being able to advertise your job for free is great from a cost perspective? But does it work?
Hiring People advertise 1000s of jobs a year for our clients, both on paid and free sites. We have crunched the numbers to look at the number of job applications you would get by only using free sites over paid.
The list of free sites we are examining are:
- Adzuna
- Careers4a
- Glassdoor
- JobisJob
- JobRapido
- Jobs4a
- Jooble
- Locanto
- Professional Passport Jobs
- SugarJobs
- Tip Top Job
- Trovit
- Zoek
The stark contrast is clear that paid sites generate on average 88 times as many applications as a free site.
Taking the free sites where the average number of applications per job was over 0.15, we are left with these three sites:
- Adzuna
- Jobs4a
- Tip Top Job
They give a combined average of 0.34 applications per job, or an expected total of approximately 1 job application per advert.
Indeed hasn’t been included in this data as we are only able to provide sponsored job adverts on the site, so do not have any data of our own. At the time of writing, there appears to be little data to suggest the average number of applications from a free Indeed Job Advert.
Cost of your time
The next challenge with advertising on multiple free sites is the time it takes to create accounts, upload your job advert and manage responses. Is repeating the same process 10+ times really a good use of your time, when you might only end up with 1 to 2 applications?
Which free job advertising sites get the most applications?
From our data, the top 10 free sites, ranked from most applications to least are:
- Tip Top Job
- Jobs4a
- Adzuna
- Professional Passport Jobs
- Careers4a
- JobRapido
- Zoek
- Glassdoor
- JobisJob
- Jooble
Use an Application Tracking System to distribute my advert to free job sites
There are pieces of software called Application Tracking System (ATS) which allow you to distribute your job advert to multiple sites at once. This takes away part of the challenge of managing multiple sites. The catch is you might need to create accounts on the respective sites, which if you are only advertising a few jobs, might not be a good use of time. The ATS is likely to also charge a fee per job advert placed.
An ATS though does come with a number of benefits:
- You can distribute the same job advert to multiple sites simultaneously
- All applications can be managed from one place
- Ability to contact all candidates with a template email
- Some systems allow scheduling of interviews
How quickly do you need a member of staff?
With a chronic staff shortage in the UK, if you need a member of staff quickly, using premium sites is likely to get a quicker and better response.
Which premium job site should I use?
From our data from the past year, our ranking of sites would be:
- Reed
- Cv-Library
- TotalJobs
- JobSite
- CW Jobs
- GuardianJobs
- Monster
With Reed being the highest performing site, if you were to only work with a single job board, our data suggests Reed would be a good place to start.
Job Board Resellers – Multi Job posters
There are companies which allow you to advertise your job on multiple sites (both paid and free job sites), and will include an ATS to help you manage the candidates.
Some Job Board Resellers will also offer flat fee recruitment services, which offers a similar service to a traditional recruitment agency, but for a fraction of the cost.
The post How does free job advertising stack up appeared first on Hiring People.
