Free job adverts & high traffic - how to make it work for you

For many smaller organisations, recruitment is a necessary evil. It is a painful distraction from the everyday activity and can be a burden – in time as well as money.

What's the biggest obstacle with advertising?

The biggest hurdle many SMEs face is right at the start of the process – finding candidates. This was central to our thinking when we created JTGO. The reason behind this is because the average job advert cost is around £350-£500 per posting. So if you were to post the role on 3 job boards you will likely spend well over £1,000. Our own research (albeit amongst a small group of 6 SMEs) showed each organisation spending more than £20,000 per annum on advertising.

However, those organisations also spend considerably more on agencies – suggesting that advertising their own jobs is not really working. But does it really have to be like that?

What free advertising is out there?

Perhaps one big misunderstanding is the range of free advertising you can get with some job boards. Those boards include: Indeed Google for Jobs and Adzuna – some of the boards that deliver the largest candidate volumes in the UK. But it isn’t just about job boards – it is also about how you can post to social media sites like LinkedIn, facebook and twitter.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the social media sites are rarely going to deliver volume to you in the way that job boards can. But when used smartly, then can certainly help spread your message and engage with a known, local audience. Why local when social media knows no boundaries? Well, if you encourage your workforce to share job opportunities on their own social media, the position will be seen by friends and family of those who already work for you. And given that around 50% of vacancies are filled by word of mouth, then this route should not be ignored.

What to be aware of with free advertising

But assuming you still want and need to advertise the position – and which of us wouldn’t? – then don’t be fooled by the job board claim that unless you pay for your advert then no-one will see it. We really don’t feel that is the case – think about how you go about searching for jobs yourself. Probably try Google first? Maybe straight to Indeed (most people’s No 1 choice for searching jobs). But there are filters there to refine your search – location, job title, salary etc. It is these filtered results that present the best matches. Not whether the job advert has been paid for or not!

So when advertising, please explore the free options. If you have an ATS (Applicant Tracking System – a recruitment system in short) then it should allow you free postings to all those sites and social media channels cited above. At JTGO we have also sought to allow ‘direct apply’ wherever possible which means your candidates don’t have to go through a third party application process. Instead, they can land right on your site and complete the application process you want them to.

How can I simplify my free advertising?

Using a system like JTGO will also allow you to handle volumes with greater ease by having auto acknowledgements to applications; by allowing you to set up simple screening questions and by allowing you to do checks (DBS and references) quickly and easily.

This focus on reducing administration time is critical for many SMEs as that is a prime reason why they may use agencies. Not only can agencies find the candidates, but they take the hassle of having to respond to them all.

But agencies charge – typically between 12-25%. So even if you hire just 2 people a year, on salaries of just £27,000 you will be paying at least £6,750. Yet if you invest in your own system (JTGO) it will cost less than £5,000. Those savings get ever greater the more hiring you do – if you hired 10 people at the same £27,000 level using agencies, then you could be paying over £33,000 – but the ATS would still only cost less than £5,000.

So don’t be put off by the cost of recruitment. Make it work for you – find yourself an ATS, utilise all the free job advertising and build your own talent pools to make sure you maximise your success in the job market.