“We’re on a tight budget, but we need a new employee. How can I promote my job vacancy well enough to reach a wide range of job seekers without paying recruiter fees or the costs associated with featured posts on job boards?”

Have you ever found yourself asking this question? Many of our clients have, and we took this opportunity to put together five tips that can help you promote your open job vacancy for free!

1 – Exploit Free Sites

There are countless numbers of sites that will allow you to post your job ads for free. At the time of this writing, Indeed and Glassdoor are two of the top three most popular sites in the US, and you can post on both of them without paying.

Even so, don’t just fill one in and be done with it. Aside from the general boards, you can also find some specific to industry, location, and other factors. Try this list from Good.co to find some job boards in your specific area.

Basically, if it’s free, there’s no excuse not to post to them all. But this can be time consuming and frustrating, so use an Applicant Tracking System that can post to multiple boards with one click if you can. 

2 – Hack Social Media

You have a LinkedIn account, and so does your company. Even if you don’t want to pay to post the job ads on the LinkedIn job boards, you can still share a link to where the job vacancy is posted elsewhere (such as on the career page of your company).

But, don’t share aimlessly. Find some groups or pages that are applicable to your position. 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?

Or, maybe you run an advertising company in New York City, and you’re searching for someone new. It would be wise to switch over to a separate social media setting and post about it in the almost 8,000 member strong NYC Ad Jobs and Networking Facebook group.

If you’re still convinced that LinkedIn is the best and only place you’ll find candidates, then just think about the following quote (and check the resources in the article it came from).

“Boasting over 300 million members, LinkedIn has cornered the market as the social network of choice for professionals around the world. However in the last few years, there has been an increase in the number of niche professional networking sites catering to different industries and specialties.” – Maebellyne Ventura

So, stop using social media to look at cat pictures, and start taking advantage of the possibilities for spreading your open position around the internet – for free.

3 – Use Your Own Web Traffic

This may sound obvious, but its potential is often overlooked. Having a career page on your site can boost interest in not only this position, but also others within your company. It doesn’t matter if the page is empty or has 10,000 vacancies because it puts it in the mind of visitors (and algorithms of the search engines) that your company wants to hire people.

“Your career site is the primary research destination on the Web for curious job seekers. It’s also the one place where you own 100 percent share of voice, giving you the perfect opportunity to sell your company and your opportunities to candidates.” – Mary Lorenz

For instance, if someone follows a link to a position on your career page and also sees the rest of the vacancies, they might think of one of their friends who is perfect for another position, and they decide to forward it on. Suddenly you have two potential employees.

One of our clients, Crowdy House, uses our service of hosting a personalized career page, and about 20% of their traffic comes from their own website (even though they post and promote on multiple job boards).

4 – Join Online Discussions

Using an Internet connection to communicate with other computers has opened up whole new worlds of networking. I’m sure when you’re standing in line at Starbucks and you overhear someone with a problem, you’ll politely give them some advice.

So, make sure you’re doing that online as well. This can benefit your career page because people are asking job related questions such as how to get into a specific industry. If that industry is yours, and your company is hiring, you just may have a new applicant. But, it gets better when you realize that future applicants can also find the conversation, your company, and your job posts.

“As it turns out, there are tons of job search resources and employment opportunities on Reddit – if you know where to look.” – Phillip Taylor-Parker

Three popular 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).

5 – Connect With Institutions

If you want to reach the right people without paying for it, you have to remember to think outside of the box. There are plenty of specific groups that can help distribute your vacancies to appropriate candidates.

For an example, take local universities. They can be a great way to find intelligent workers who can do administrative tasks and don’t need to work full time. Or, why not try clubs with solid membership bases? Even if you think that the local bingo group has nothing to do with you, they might be happy to pass on your offer to their participants. It’s even better if it’s an organization dealing with the topic of your needed employee (such as a hacking club when you’re searching for a programmer).

It Doesn’t Stop There

This list, of course, doesn’t contain every source you’d ever need to post something for free. But, the big takeaway that you should get is that you can spread news about your job without breaking the bank. Don’t be afraid to use some out-of-the-box thinking and enlist a little creativity.

Do you know any other ways to promote a job vacancy offer for free, or do you have a specific question about anything else related to recruitment? Comment, Email us or send a tweet, and we can help research ways to make sure that your hiring headaches become a thing of the past.

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This post originally appeared on Recruitee Blog (newsletter: eepurl.com/bMHiZD) 

Hagi Trinh is an avid recruitment writer at Recruitee. The team is working on the greatest hiring platform of all time. You can sign up at recruitee.com to try it out and follow us on Twitter @recruiteeHR.