If you’ve been Googling ‘where can I post jobs online for free?’ for over an hour, you’ve likely been met with many paid job board options. This goes against the whole reason for your search.
Whether you’re looking to find candidates for a permanent, temporary or freelance position, job advertising in the right spot is key to finding the perfect fit for the role.
While larger companies often have deep pockets to help source qualified candidates, many smaller companies may not have the funds to take advantage of expensive recruitment channels.
That’s why free job advertising channels, instead of paid ones, are an excellent way for companies to build their candidate pools while keeping costs at a minimum.
When considering which free job promotion method might work best for you, it’s important to remember the type of employee you’re looking for and where they’re most likely to be searching for jobs. Everyone uses the internet differently.
Depending on your industry, this could be online job boards or offline channels such as trade shows or recruitment centers.
The way to zoom in on the right channels is by knowing your ideal candidate. This will help you determine which platform is suitable for the task at hand and minimize the number of unqualified applications you receive.
To help get you started, we’ve put together a list of places you can post jobs online for free that work well for most industries.
Start job advertising for free without using a job board
If you’re looking for a way to post your organization’s current and future vacancies without resorting to paid job boards, use this list.
Consider whether your ideal candidate would spend most of their time on the platforms that jump out at you before investing your time into a hiring strategy specific to the channel(s) you select.
- Post your vacancy on social media
There are currently an estimated 4.48 billion social media users globally. With so many people scrolling through social media every minute, there’s a beautiful amount of potential just waiting to be tapped into.
With that in mind, start using your personal and company LinkedIn account to share your job openings and encourage your connections to share them.
You don’t need to pay for LinkedIn’s job board. The platform, even without the paid extras, is very valuable for promoting job openings. If you have many connections, posting a link to your career site will definitely help you get some applications.
Sharing your job openings in LinkedIn groups can also be of great help. For example, if you’re located in London and need a PR person, why not mention it in the London PR Jobs group to see if one of the roughly 2,500 members is interested? Doing this helps you to target more precisely, which can lead to more and better applicants.
Facebook can also be of great value in your job-promoting efforts. You can use your company and personal page to post about any job openings you have. Facebook groups can also be very effective places to post in.
There are many different communities on Facebook that have their group. An example is our very own Talent Acquisition Innovators group on Facebook, where recruiters and HR managers can join and exchange ideas. Such groups exist for other professions as well, and these can be used to promote your vacancies.
There are thousands of adorable cat videos on social media, and that’s great. But don’t forget to take advantage of social media’s potential to fill your job openings for free.
- Use your company’s website
It may seem obvious, but using your own website traffic to get applicants is one of the most effective ways to post jobs online for free.
Our customer, Crowdy House, uses their website to get traffic to their careers page. Almost 20% of the traffic to their careers page comes from their main site.
A career page is an extremely valuable asset for acquiring the best talent and creating and cultivating a talent pool.
It makes it simpler for people to get to know what your company is like as an employer. Also, it gets indexed by search engines, making it easier for job seekers to find your job openings.
Career pages are a must-have when you are looking to grow and refine your company’s hiring strategy.
Even if you don’t have any job openings, a careers page should be set up to communicate your employer brand to any potential future candidates.
Just having a careers page in itself encourages people to have you in mind when they might look for a job in the future. Why? Because it’s straightforward, easy to use, and regularly updated. If you do it right, of course.
- Network digitally by joining online discussions and threads
The social web has opened up many new opportunities for networking.
In our digital age, we no longer have to put on a black suit and tie and attend a formal corporate dinner to network with others within the industry. Instead, you simply need a laptop or phone with a working camera and microphone.
So, make sure you’re making the most of the hundreds of digital networking opportunities.
Get involved in online discussions: comment sections, Twitter chats, and forums.
People often ask questions about roles, opportunities, and companies. This gives you a consistent and frequently open window to share your knowledge, vacancies, and opportunities.
By engaging on forums and networking events, you can easily get people to apply for your open jobs.
Three of the most popular and most effective sites you can check out are Quora (a large question/answer forum), Reddit (the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet”), and HubSpot (one of the best inbound marketing companies out there).
- Use Craigslist to post your vacancy online for free
Craigslist hosts advertisements for essentially everything, and that includes job openings.
The whole aim is to connect with people within communities, making it an excellent platform to scour for potential candidates to add to your talent pool.
Again, you can interact with people on forums, which allows you to prove your company’s values and ethics. This appeals to the right kind of people that’ll be a solid cultural fit.
- Get creative with your team
There are so many ways that you can post vacancies online for free. As such, this list doesn’t contain all sources of free job promoting out there.
The main point is: promoting open jobs without spending much is definitely possible. And not only is it possible, but it’s a tactic you can incorporate into your hiring strategy time and time again.
It will require some dedication, effort, and creativity from you and your team, but the results could absolutely be worth it.
Post jobs online for free - just a few free job boards
1. Indeed.com
As one of the most popular job sites in the world, Indeed.com should be the first stop on any recruiter’s search for candidates. With over 200 monthly job seekers and a presence in over 60 countries, Indeed.com gets your job ad in front of more people than any other site.
Because of this reach, and because it offers completely free job advertising options, Indeed.com is perhaps the most cost-effective channel for sourcing as many qualified candidates as possible. Be sure to write and tag your job ad some that it’s easy to find using Indeed’s search and filter tools.
2. Ladders
While Indeed allows you to advertise for virtually any role, Ladders is targeted explicitly to more senior positions with starting salaries above $100,000 USD.
This makes Ladders an excellent tool for filling your vacant manager and executive positions instead of going through expensive job placement agencies.
You can post an unlimited number of jobs ads and search as many resumes as you like for free.
3. PostJobFree
PostJobFree is a great way to get your post your job ads to several websites simultaneously.
This site acts as a feeder to the larger job boards like Indeed, meaning that whatever is added here will likely be picked up by many other free jobs posting sites.
You can also search the PostJobFree database of resumes for candidates at no charge.
4. Google for Jobs
Google for Jobs allows employers to put their job ads in front of the millions of job seekers who use the search engine on any given day.
As a job ad aggregator, Google for Jobs scrapes relevant job ads from various websites and jobs boards and lists them at the top of search results.
Employers can take advantage of this free job advertisement channel by posting their vacant positions directly onto their websites and structuring the posts with the proper HTML coding syntax outlined by Google. (If you’re a Recruitee user, this is done automatically for all of your vacancies!) Job ads that are correctly structured will be indexed by Google for Jobs and displayed when job seekers search for related keywords. You can also post jobs to free third-party websites that Google already indexes, such as Indeed or Glassdoor.
Free, offline job advertising
If you’re not having any luck finding candidates through free online job advertisements, you can take your hiring hunt offline.
Depending on the role you’re looking to fill, and the industry you’re in, physically going to the places where your potential candidates congregate can be a powerful recruitment tactic.
List of the best places for free, offline job advertisement:
- Government-run job service offices
- Industry-specific conferences, trade shows, and workshops
- Networking events
- Local universities, colleges or trade schools
- University or college job fairs
- Community bulletin boards
- Niche blogs
- Facebook Groups
For most of these options, you can combine your free job advertisements with some good, old-fashioned networking in order to create lasting connections in your community.
These connections can be leveraged each time you have a vacant position to fill, giving you a consistent back channel of potential talent.
Diversify your job advertisements
While each of the free job advertising and promotion channels listed above is a great way to source candidates, you should always look to diversify where you’re advertising your vacant positions.
Sourcing candidates from multiple places will help you connect with various candidates in terms of skill and personality, but it will also give you great intel into which channels work best for you.
The best part of this? Free job advertising means you can experiment at no cost to your company! Experimentation is crucial for a working strategy. You must know what doesn’t work to find what does. So, with this in mind, take advantage of using the internet to post jobs for free.
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