Best Time to Advertise a Job: Recommended Schedule
Be deliberate with your timings. The following advice has been refined through years of experience, but if required, I wouldn’t hesitate to advertise an urgent vacancy outside of this recommended schedule.
Time of the Day
Publish job adverts first thing in the morning, around 8 am, to coincide with the daily commute. Adverts are then near the top of the search results, ready for the lunchtime surge, and hopefully still near the top when jobseekers arrive home. The next day, there is often a second increase in applications because job sites send out email alerts.
Day of the Week
Jobseekers search and apply for jobs mostly during the working week. So, publish job adverts between Monday and Thursday.
Avoid publishing jobs on a Friday. I appreciate you may have worked hard to finalise the advert after several rounds of revisions with several stakeholders. You may want to mentally tick it off your to-do list before leaving for the weekend. Yet taking action for the sake of it doesn’t always make sense, and at least you can publish it first thing on Monday morning and have a quick win.
The amount of jobseeker activity usually drops off at the weekend. This can be counter-intuitive because you would expect them to have better access to a computer. But the statistics continuously prove weekends aren’t a great time to publish jobs.
Day of the Month
Interestingly, jobs receive more applications in the final third of the month, which could coincide with payday.
However, because most duration based job adverts cover an entire month, you’re only likely to modify publishing dates and advertising budgets if you use a cost-per-action model.
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Time of the Year
Jobseeker activity drops slightly during school holidays and Christmas. Then activity rises quickly from New Year’s Day onwards. You can see this when searching “jobs” on Google Trends. (But be careful when using Google Trends as there are anomalies, such as in October 2011 when Steve Jobs died.)
A clear exception to this is trainee, apprenticeship, and graduate roles, which see most activity during summer holidays when exams have finished and results are released. You may also find similar spikes when professional qualification results are released.
Avoid Special Events and Public Holidays
Don’t publish around bank holidays; application rates are lower because jobseekers are taking a break from thinking about work.
Similarly, application rates are even lower on weekends with special events such as Mother’s and Father’s Day. Prominent sporting events, such as football World Cups, also dent application rates.
Finally, I’ve noticed that significant government events like budgets and elections can hinder applications.
Be Careful Advertising Too Much
If you’re constantly advertising, jobseekers may incorrectly perceive your company has a high staff turnover. For example, I once recruited for a rapidly growing call centre. We published many employer-branded job adverts and found the application rate kept dropping. I held focus groups with jobseekers to better understand the issue. They told me that they saw the business advertising for the same role repeatedly and thought this was a sign of a staff attrition problem rather than of fast growth!
To avoid this trap, fundamentally change the copy so it appears to be a new job. A great way to achieve this is using AI for inspiration and polish off with a human copywriter. Or you could advertise jobs anonymously.
Additional Resources
- Talent Acquisition Book: The Secrets of Great Recruitment: How to Recruit Great Emloyees.
- Downloadable PDF guide; Revealed: The Ultimate Structure for High-Impact Job Adverts.
- Article; How to Write a Advert That Attracts Great Performers: Secrets Revealed.
- Article; Write a Job Advert: Crafting the Perfect Posting to Attract Quality Applicants.
- Article; How to Optimise a Job Advert: Techniques Proven to Boost Your Application Rates!
- Article; Advertising Jobs With a Company Logo is Probably a Waste of Time!
- Article; How to Publish Job Adverts: Manual vs. Automated.
The secrets of great recruitment
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