When do job hunters job hunt?

The other day I got a call from a client who wanted to post a job on a friday afternoon in 'anticipation' of a weekend rush by job seekers. The problem with her theory however is that it's completely wrong. That thinking may have been prevalent in the age of the newspaper, but in the age of online job sites the stats tell a different story.

The figure below suggests that Mondays are actually the best day of the week to post a job. I did a screen shot of my web analytics from my largest job board, FairfieldCountyJobs.com, which serves the southwestern portion of Connecticut.

As you can clearly see the beginning of the week has the most traffic with the least trafficked day being Saturday. So it turns out that friday is the worst day to post a job. Not only will it attract the least eyeballs it runs the risk of being buried in the listings as the week goes on. So my best advice is to post jobs Sunday night for the Monday morning crowd.

Job hunters job hunt at work. This is a fact that most job boards have come to understand over the past 10 years. It's tme for employers and recruiters to realize this.

Comment by Chris Russell on April 15, 2010 at 8:49am: I should also add that the chart you see above almost never changes on a week to week basis. Traffic is remarkably consistent during the week.

Comment by Karla Porter on April 15, 2010 at 2:09pm: I agree Chris - In the olden days when people looked to "change jobs" and were busy working all week, they looked to the Sunday classifieds for new opportunity. Nowadays, job hunting is a job and that seems to start on Mondays, with weekends off...

Comment by Slouch on April 15, 2010 at 2:23pm: and in case you want to recruit them with the telephone, every day of the week is a good day for that.