Top 10 Free Ways to Advertise Your Job Openings

Save quite a bit of cash by taking advantage of these free ways to advertise your job openings:

10. Blog

Writing a blog is free (we recommend using WordPress.com), and allows you to put your message on the web without involving your IT department.

9. Twitter

With TwitterFeed, you can easily setup your jobs to auto-post on your Twitter site - just follow these easy instructions.

8. SimplyHired.com

Simply Hired is a free job posting site that also powers the career sites of popular sites such as MySpace and US News.

7. Indeed.com

Indeed accepts free job postings, and also optimizes your postings for search engines. Quite a few of our clients get the majority of their online candidates from Indeed.com, because the jobs rank highly on Google. myStaffingPro has a free add-on that will post all your jobs to both Simply Hired and Indeed automatically.

6. Linked In

Linked In is a powerful way to source new candidates. Even though many of the recruitment features built into Linked In require cash, recruiter Erin Campbell wrote an informative blog on how to leverage the power of Linked In, without spending a dime.

5. Business Cards

For a very small investment, you can print business cards that advertise your career site. Hand these out to your employees to encourage employee referrals, and keep a stack at the front desk to pass on to walk-ins.

4. SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the art of creating a career site and job descriptions that are ranked highly on popular search engines like Google and Yahoo. If your jobs show up on search engines directly from your career site, you may never have to pay for a job board again! (At myStaffingPro we build SEO right into our customer's career sites. For more information, download the myStaffingPro SEO checklist).

3. Your Organization's Career Site

You'll want the careers section of your organization's career site to be easy to find. The candidates most interested in working for your company will get there first. So lean on the web site designers to put Careers somewhere on the home page - better yet, include careers in your main menu.

2. Your employees

Employee referrals are still the most popular source for new hires. Encourage more referrals by creating an employee referral portal, communicating new job openings with your employees, and designing incentives for employees when a referral is hired.

1. The reputation of your organization

The number one free way to attract applicants is the reputation of your organization. If your employees enjoy their job, they will recommend more applicants. As the word gets around, you'll have too many candidates to handle for some of your jobs!

Comment by Charles Van Heerden on October 21, 2009 at 3:08am: Julia, great post and always nice to save money by being more innovative. Thanks for sharing!

Comment by Julia on October 21, 2009 at 9:48am: Thank you for the comment!

Comment by Gerry Crispin on October 21, 2009 at 11:54am: Nice list! Thank you. Worth adding under #2, "your employees", that some companies are now inviting their employees to embed a "come work with me" widget on their personal Facebook page to leverage the online distribution of jobs and links back to the career pages.

Comment by Julia on October 21, 2009 at 12:45pm: Gerry, do you know the name of the ""come work with me" widget for Facebook?

Comment by Gerry Crispin on October 21, 2009 at 2:40pm: That's the name. About 7000 Enterprise employees have it (that was developed by TMP but several other services are doing it and, since what we are really talking about a fancy macro that scrapes a subset of jobs into a scrolling window on a facebook page, it is a fairly easy tech tool for any developer to build). Not 100% free however so may not perfectly fit your list.)

Comment by Julia on October 21, 2009 at 2:47pm: Good to know! Thank you for sharing.

Comment by Hassan Rizwan on October 22, 2009 at 9:20am: We do focus on many of the points already but this blog has certainly added something to our company's approach. Thank you Julia. Continue the good work.

Comment by Cheryl Burch Citrone on December 9, 2011 at 10:46am: Julia - Great post. However, I was not aware that Simply Hired provided free job postings. The site I am aware of costs $69 per posting. Can you elaborate on how to take advantage of the free posting???

Comment by Julia on December 9, 2011 at 11:12am: Our applicant tracking system, myStaffingPro, has a partnership with SimplyHired where they scrape and post all of our clients' openings for free. If you do not have an ATS, or they are not a partner, you can manually post your opening for free at http://free.simplyhired.com/a/jbb/sponsor-job. The other option is to pay for a sponsored listing and receive top of page placement.

Comment by Cheryl Burch Citrone on December 9, 2011 at 11:40am: We do have an ATS and will talk to our Systems team about partnering with Simply Hired to scrape our postings.

Thanks for feedback

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