Where’s the best place to advertise your job vacancy?

By Amy @BubbleJobs

If you’re a recruiter these days, your job is far from easy. From creating outstanding job ads (following Bubble’s advice, of course!) to interviewing and picking out the right candidates, there’s lots of work to be done for each and every vacancy… and then even if you place someone and it doesn’t work out (through no fault of your own!), you still risk losing some of your fee!

In fact, even deciding where to advertise your vacancy can be a major task within itself. Gone are the days when you could just stick a job ad in the local corner shop – nowadays it’s all online and you’ve got things like cost per click and cost per app to worry about!

While there’s no denying that the move towards online has made recruitment a hundred times easier when it comes to receiving and processing applications, it’s also a lot more challenging because there’s now more choice than ever when it comes to finding the right site for your vacancy.

First up it’s general job sites like ermm…. jobsite! Sites like these advertise every vacancy under the sun which means the site in general usually holds a lot of weight in the search engines for numerous search terms – this in turn means they tend to attract a lot of traffic from all types of job seekers on a daily basis. The down side of these sites is they tend to attract job seekers from all industries so the quality of applications can vary hugely.

While general job sites advertise every single job going from every industry imaginable, niche job boards, like Bubble, specialise in advertising vacancies within a certain niche industry. Because they operate in a strict niche, they tend to have better quality ads and vacancies on board than more general sites, however their ‘niche-ness’ means they only attract job seekers in a certain industry – this means they tend to have lower visitor figures than more general job sites.

Now, just when you think you’ve got a handle on tens of thousands of job boards and sites out there, you realise you’ve forgotten an extremely important piece of the puzzle – job search aggregators. Yep, job search aggregators are the big guns of the online job platforms – they scrape a number of the job boards out there and post all the individual vacancies on to their own site, usually charging each job board every time someone clicks on their ad. The sheer size and number of vacancies posted on job search sites like Indeed and Adzuna make them super-powerful in the SERPs which normally guarantees them tens of thousands of visitors every day.

So, when you’re posting a job ad – which is the better option; general job sites, niche job boards or job search aggregators? Well the first thing to point out is that you can’t actually post on a job search aggregator – they normally just take feeds from the various job sites and job boards out there and charge them for every click that goes through to their own site. So that just leaves two – general job sites and niche job boards. Now it’s important to point out at this stage that the right option will depend on the type of candidate you’re looking for and the type of role you’re advertising.

While general job sites might be popular and powerful, sites like these are normally pretty general and don’t tend to attract the kind of specialist candidates that niche job boards can attract. On the other hand, general job sites normally have a pretty big reach, thanks to their size and power, which means they normally attract a lot more visitors in total than the smaller job boards – and more eyeballs on your job ad could directly lead to more apps!

It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that when you choose a job board your ad will appear on that board and that board only. Some job boards are part of a larger group of job boards which all help to promote each others’ vacancies – this effectively helps to increase the potential reach of each job ad and can lead to some great alternative applications – this is definitely worth bearing in mind when trying to choose the best place to advertise your vacancy!

Similarly, it’s worth asking both job sites and job boards if they work with any job search aggregators when promoting your vacancy – this will help you to determine how much reach and promotion your vacancy is likely to receive.

When it comes to finding the right place to advertise your vacancy, the decision ultimately lies with you. If you’d rather have lots of (potentially low quality) apps, go for a general job board but if you’d rather have a smaller number of “on-target” applications, definitely go for a niche job board.

And of course, if you’re looking to advertise web, digital, e-commerce and social media jobs you should definitely consider Bubble!

Tags: Job Adverts, online job boards, recruiter tips, recruitment advice

About the Author

Amy Edwards Amy Edwards is the SEO Manager for Bubble Jobs. With a strong background in online content and copywriting, Amy is responsible all the on-site and off-site SEO of Bubble Jobs and the Bubble Jobs blog. You can follow her on Twitter here or add her to your circles on Google+ here.