Great Job Posting Sites for Employers

So far, 2023 has been a strange year for jobs. Very large companies have been doing mass layoffs—some of them have had multiple rounds already. But unemployment rate is still very low. As far as we can tell, small businesses are still having trouble recruiting new workers. So, now that you need to hire your first employees, where do you go look for them? There are the obvious job posting sites for employers—Indeed, for example. But there are other less obvious places to post your jobs too. We go over them in this article.

This article is a part of our series on how to hire your first employees. Actually getting applications for your job opening is important, of course. But other aspects of hiring like figuring out which employment laws you have to follow are important too. So, whether you’re new to the hiring process or just need a quick refresher, we encourage you to take a look at our entire series by following the link above.

We’ll start with some less obvious places to look for employees and then move on to a quick profile of some of the popular internet job posting sites for employers.

When Looking for Employees, Don’t Forget to Try the Old-Fashioned Ways First

Before you try any of the internet job posting sites, be sure to have tried some of the old-fashioned ways of looking for employees too. For example, if you have a physical store, setting a Help Wanted sign outside your store might still get a few resumes for you. Or if you’re a web-based business, a Work for Us section on your website showing your open jobs can work the same way.

If you’re open to training less experienced workers, your local high school or college career center might be able to connect you with students or recent grads who’re looking for work. You might be able to find a great employee or two if you’re willing to give these young adults a chance.

Of course, there’s also word of mouth. Not just in-person word of mouth, but also your social media network too. Get the word out that you’re hiring, and maybe you’ll land an applicant or two.

Don’t Forget Professional Organizations’ Job Posting Sites

Most job seekers know about the general job posting sites like CareerBuilder. But, if you’re looking for folks with specialized knowledge or a professional background, you could post your opening on professional organization sites.

Not all professional organizations have job boards, but some do. It’s worth your time exploring these specialized job boards to fill very specific positions.

Your State’s Labor/Workforce Agencies Sometimes Have Job Posting Sites Too

In many states, workers collecting unemployment insurance have to show that they’re looking for work. To help these workers, these states have job boards too.

We can’t say if every state has such a job posting site for employers, but many states do. We think it’s worth your while to do a little research and see if your state has such a site. If you post your job opening there, you might get some applications.

You Probably Won’t Need to Work Through an Independent Recruiter

There are two types of recruiters: those who work as employees for a business and those who work for independent recruiting companies. The recruiters who work as employees tend to handle things like posting job openings, doing first round interviews, and similar for their employer. They also help convince well qualified candidates to take an offer, after one is made to them.

Independent recruiters will do similar things, except some of them actively contact highly qualified candidates who’re sometimes working for your competitors. These recruiters work on a commission. The commission is usually a percentage of the salary of the successful candidate, and it’s paid out over a period of time like a year. You, the employer, pay the commission.

Because of this payment structure, businesses usually use outside recruiters only for high-paying and hard to place jobs. So, unless you’re trying to find a C-level executive or are willing to pay a six-figure salary for a worker with very specialized knowledge, it’s too expensive for a very small business to use third party recruiters.

We’re only mentioning independent recruiters for completeness. If you think you need to hire an executive-level employee as one of your first employees, you can always place an ad on job boards like LinkedIn and Ladders. Upper management employees tend to gather on these two sites. You can contact them yourself and save that expensive commission.

Some Payroll Software Include Membership in Job Posting Sites as a Part of Their Subscription

As a part of this series on how to hire your first employees, we did an article on picking a payroll software to help you calculate and submit all the taxes and withholdings for your employees. Some of the software have service tiers with HR functionalities. And some of these functionalities include membership to one of the general job posting sites we profile below.

We suspect that the HR memberships are better suited for larger businesses. After all, they have a somewhat predictable number of employee turnovers every month. But, if you’re thinking about using one or more of these job sites for the long term and think you might hire lots of employees fairly quickly, be sure to look for these memberships when you’re picking your payroll software. This way, you won’t have to pay extra for posting job openings.

A Word on How Pay-Per-View and Pay-Per-Click Ads Work on Job Posting Sites

On a lot of the job posting sites we profile, you can post a job for free. But it will be one among many. So, to make sure candidates see your job post first, you can pay extra to move it to the top of the pile.

Pay-Per-View and Pay-Per-Click Defined

Of course, there are only a few top spots for any given search result. The standard practice of advertising on the internet is to auction the spots off to the highest bidder.

This is how pay-per-view ads work. Whenever your ads are shown to your target audience, you pay a small fee. But there’s another way to charge advertisers—pay per click. Here, you don’t pay when people view your ad. You only pay when they click it.

How Ad Auctioning Works

By their very nature, pay-per-view and pay-per-click ads depend on how much competition there is for those top spots on any given page where you want to show your ad. So, the price to boost your ad to the top depends on how many candidates are looking for a job like yours in the location you’re hiring. It also depends on how many other businesses are hiring similar candidates as you and are willing to advertise like you. The fewer the candidates and the more other businesses are willing to spend, the higher you’ll have to pay to get the top spots for your ad.

Most businesses don’t like to spend for goods or services without knowing ahead of time how much they have to pay. But, by their very nature, it’s hard to predict how much internet advertising will cost.

The only thing we can suggest is to have a budget in mind before you advertise. Ask for an estimate of how many times your ad will appear, based on your budget. Once your budget runs out, your ad will stop running. If you need it to run for longer, you can then decide if you wish to spend more.

Indeed and GlassDoor are Owned by the Same Company

According to Indeed, it has 63.6 million monthly users. That’s a lot of job searchers looking for all sorts of jobs. Indeed and Glassdoor are sister companies both owned by Recruit Holdings. Indeed focuses on individual job postings while Glassdoor focuses on information about your company.

You can only post job openings on Indeed but the jobs appear on Glassdoor as well. Indeed offers several types of services. We’ll go over each individually.

Indeed Free Tier

When you sign up for Indeed as an employer, you’ll get a dashboard to manage the job post and the applications all the way through the hiring process.

You can post jobs for free, but they’re just basic posts. Candidates can search job openings based on key words and location. If your job fits their search criteria, it’ll show up.  

But it’s unlikely that your job post will be the first few the candidate sees.

Indeed Sponsored Posts

To move your job post higher in a candidate’s search, you can pay extra to advertise your post. You can pick to pay per click or pay per application. Indeed will show you an estimated cost before you approve the ad. This way, you understand the budget and can back out if you wish.

If you pick to pay per job application, then you can reject an application within 72 hours of receipt. This way, you won’t be charged. You can base your payment on the number of applications you receive or you can simply set a dollar amount. Once you hit the amount, you won’t receive any more applications.

With this Sponsored Post tier, you also get to screen candidates by specifying deal breakers. This way, you won’t be flooded with applications from candidates that you know you’ll never hire.

Indeed will also automatically search their database for candidates that match your job requirements. (They call this Instant Match.) Then, you can decide if you want to invite these candidates to apply to your job. If you do, Indeed will send a customized email invite to these candidates. If your Sponsored Post is based on pay-per-click pricing, then you get 30 invites for your account per month. If you pay per application, then you get more invites.

Indeed Resume

The Indeed Resume service lets you search resumes already in their database. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial, and you get 20 contacts to reach out to candidates and invite them to interview. Thereafter, you can pay for the Standard Tier, which costs $120/month or $1,150/year for 30 contacts per month. Or you can upgrade to the Professional Tier for $300/month or $2,880/year for 100 contacts per month.

This is just a subscription to Indeed’s resume database. It doesn’t include any boosts to your regular job ads that you can post for free.

LinkedIn is a Networking Site and a Job Posting Site

LinkedIn has more than 850 million active users. It started as a social media platform for professionals to network. But, a part of networking is about contacting each other for job opportunities. This is how LinkedIn grew to become a job posting site as well. These days, you can still do word-of-mouth advertising on LinkedIn for your job openings by sharing it with your network and your network’s network.

LinkedIn does have paid job ads as well. They offer many recruiting-related services for businesses of all sizes. For our article, we’ll just focus on the ones small businesses can use—posting one or a handful of jobs at a time.

You can post job openings for free, but you’ll have to pay to promote your job posting. Free postings are for one at a time. You can pay to post multiple jobs at the same time, and pay for the ads on a click-through basis. You can target your click-through ads by geographic location and by the candidate’s skills.

LinkedIn will post your Job ads across LinkedIn pages and in emails. You can set a daily budget, and you pay only when a candidate clicks your ad to look at your full job posting. LinkedIn will give you an estimate of the number of applications you’ll receive for the budget you set.  

CareerBuilder is a Very Popular Job Posting Site

CareerBuilder claims it has over 140 million candidate resumes and profiles for you to search through. They offer several types of plans for businesses of various sizes. Here, we’ll focus on their small business offerings.

CareerBuilder offers a free trial where you can post one job for 5 days. Thereafter, you have to pick one of their four plans.

All your job posts are within a 30 mile radius of a specific city. You can expand the area, but you’ll have to pay extra. Contact CareerBuilder to find out the price.

Other than the Pay as You Go plan, all the other CareerBuilder plans are month-to-month plans. They automatically renew at the end of each month, but you can cancel at any time. You can pay extra for CareerBuilder to post your job ad on other sites in the CareerBuilder network/family. You can also pay more to get HR tools to help you manage multiple candidates for multiple hiring managers.

Below are CareerBuilder’s plans for small businesses.

Pay as You Go

CareerBuilder’s Pay as You Go plan costs $425 for 1 job posting. The post will be available for 12 months.

The plan also comes with access to CareerBuilder’s database of resumes and candidate profiles. You can search through the database for candidates that match your job requirements. Then you can contact them through a “resume action.” You get 10 of these per day.

You can also be notified when a candidate that matches your criteria uploads their resume. You get 10 notifications per day.

Lastly, you get 35 email contacts so you can invite candidates that fit your job criteria to apply.

Lite

CareerBuilder’s Lite plan costs $349/month. You get basically the same benefits as the Pay as You Go plan for $75 less. But your job posting will last only 1 month. Nothing prevents you from reposting the same job the next month, of course.

Standard

The Standard plan costs $449/month. You get 3 simultaneous job postings, 30 resume search actions, 30 notifications, and 100 targeted emails to candidates. Everything else is the same as the Lite plan.

Pro

The Pro plan costs $749/month. You get 5 simultaneous job postings, 50 resume search actions, 40 notifications, and 150 targeted emails. Everything else is the same as the Standard plan.

Monster Used to Advertise Heavily Many Years Ago

Monster is one of the oldest job sites on the internet. It went live in 1994. According to SEMrush (a company that keeps real-time website traffic data), Monster had 11.4M visits in February 2023 (the latest data at the time we wrote this article). So, a job ad on Monster should get a fair number of views from possible candidates.

Monster has many service plans for businesses of different sizes. For small businesses, Monster offers three plans:

• Monster+: This is Monster’s pay-as-you-go advertising plan. You can start with a budget of as little as $10 per day. You get to boost one ad, and you pay when a candidate clicks on your ad and views or applies for the job. As with all click-through ads, the price per click can vary depending on a lot of factors.
• Standard: The Standard plan is $399/month. It comes with a 4 day free trial. You can post up to 3 active jobs at a time.
• Premium: The Premium plan is $649/month, with a 4 day free trial. You can post up to 5 jobs at a time, and you can search Monster’s resume database and view up to 250 resumes.

All Monster’s plans come with a job listing on Monster and its affiliated sites. Your job post will also be sent via email to candidates who are interested in similar jobs.

For the Standard and Premium plans, you can pay more to advertise your job listing based on per-view or click-through rates.

A ZipRecruiter Membership Comes with the Enhanced Tier of ADP RUN Payroll

ZipRecruiter is another well-known and popular job posting site. They don’t post pricing for their services at all. To us, this suggests that their services are probably not competitively priced.

We’ll give you what reliable information we collected from ZipRecruiter’s site. We did find some third party review sites that give ZipRecruiter’s pricing. You can do this search yourself, but we won’t post the numbers here because we’re not sure how accurate they are.

ZipRecruiter offers 3 tiers of services to small businesses. These are:

• Standard: This plan sends your job posting to ZipRecruiter’s main site and its affiliate sites. Based on your ad, ZipRecruiter will also use its AI algorithm to invite potentially interested candidates to apply to your job opening.
• Premium: This plan includes everything in Standard plus you can search ZipRecruiter’s resume database to find candidates to invite to apply.
• Pro: The Pro plan includes everything in Premium plus the ability to boost certain job posts for hard to fill jobs.

Lately, “AI” has become a buzzy marketing term. ZipRecruiter claims that it uses its “powerful AI to proactively reach candidates.” We suspect this is just a good algorithm that detects various keywords in the profiles of ZipRecruiter’s database and then sends emails to those candidates. Our guess is that there’s nothing magical about ZipRecruiter’s AI.

We profiled payroll software in an earlier article. We want to point out that, if you decide to go with the ADP RUN payroll software, a ZipRecruiter account comes with the ADP RUN’s Enhanced service tier.

Honorable Mention for High Paying Jobs: Ladders

At this stage in your business’s growth, our guess is that you’re not ready to hire higher priced workers. These workers tend to be professionals or higher level executives. Small businesses with just a handful of employees probably will never need someone to fill this type of role.

This is why we have focused on more-or-less general job boards for this article. But, just in case you’re looking to hire a high level executive as one of your first hires, there is a job board that focuses on six-figure jobs: Ladders.

But don’t forget LinkedIn as well. There are lots of executives and professionals networking on that platform too.

Job Seekers Tend to Look at Multiple Job Posting Sites, so Pick One and Go With It

Based on our personal experience, when a person is looking for a job, they tend to visit several job posting sites. So, you don’t have to post your job opening on every job board. Just pick one and then post in every place where you can get a free listing. So long as your post is in a couple of places, you should get a fair number of prospective employees to submit their resumes.

But a job ad isn’t everything. Boosting your ad with a pay-per-click or pay-per-view advertising may or may not get you qualified candidates.

At the end of the day, we think the best way to attract lots of candidates is to do some research and see what pay range your peer businesses are offering. Then, post a competitive pay range in your ad. (But first figure out if you can afford the rate, of course.) If you offer a rate higher than your peer businesses, you’ll probably receive more resumes than them. This is pretty much common sense.

Interested in starting and running a small business? Here’s the beginning of our step-by-step guide: What to do right after getting that great business idea.