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Introduction

Whatever type of business you run, it is likely that you will at some point need to take on or expand your staff.

There are several ways of advertising a vacancy, but one of the fastest growing methods is to advertise with an online job site. These display your advert in the same way as a newspaper or job centre, and people can then either apply for the vacancy directly with you or through the job site.

Why Advertise Job Vacancies Online?

(i) High Exposure

By placing a vacancy ad online, you will be exposing the position to a much greater number of people than through traditional media. Some job websites receive over 1million unique visitors each month, providing much higher exposure than almost all local newspapers or job centre adverts. Although it is worth remembering that a local newspaper will be focused on the specific town or region, whereas the job site will be focused across the whole country.

Most jobsites have a large number of registered job seekers, many of which have their CV’s stored directly with the jobsite. This means that in some cases the advert can be up within an hour, and responses to your advert can start arriving within a day.

(ii) Longer Exposure

When you place an advert in a newspaper, it appears for one day and then disappears. Even with a weekly newspaper, the advert will only be around for 6 or 7 days at the most.

By placing an advert with a job website, the advert can remain online for up to 6 weeks. The shortest placement period of the sites we researched was two weeks, with the average placement period being four weeks.

(iii) Responses

With such large numbers of people being able to view your vacancy, you are likely to get a considerable number of responses from potential employees. Although normally a good thing, it may also be a disadvantage, as you could end up with so many applications that it is impossible to check them all in the detail you would wish. You could also receive many applications that are not relevant or are from candidates missing the necessary qualifications or experience.

To combat this problem, many sites offer forms of CV sorting. This allows you to receive the details of the more relevant applicants only. This can be done either manually or electronically, for example:

Workthing.com has a “Smartsift” tool that allows you to select criteria to shortlist candidates, saving time on looking at each one individually.

Monster.co.uk offers several paid CV sorting services, and offers the option of a pre-interview questionnaire and screening, this means that only relevant candidates will be passed on to you.

Searching for Job Vacancies Online

One big advantage of most online job sites is that any potential candidate can search for a job by area, job type or salary. This means that instead of searching through every listing to find an appropriate job, a person can narrow down the results to jobs that are more relevant to them.

This also helps to ensure that the candidates who do apply are actually relevant for your job vacancy.

Cost of Advertising Job Vacancies Online

The cost of posting a job advert online varies depending on the site and the number (and prominence) of adverts that you wish to place. Some job sites still only allow job postings through a detailed registration process.

Others (such as Totaljobs.com and gojobsite.co.uk) allow any business to post a vacancy online in a matter of minutes.

Extra features, such as a detailed ‘recruitment site’ for your business can cost up to thousands of pounds extra, although these are only really necessary for larger firms with many vacant jobs.

The average cost of placing a single online advert is about £200 for one month, although this can vary significantly depending on the site and the features of the advert (e.g.: size and detail). Placing multiple adverts as a long term registered business will usually be cheaper over time, but is of little benefit to a small business with just one or two vacancies.

Online advertising is generally a lot cheaper than offline, so trying an online ad at some stage is a worthwhile piece of research.

One of the major sites we researched (www.gis-a-job.com) actually offers a free basic listings of jobs, with the option of paying for better placement and features. This is ideally suited to small businesses who wish to advertise a single job for a low cost, although it is worth remembering that the free adverts will (of course) appear below the paid adverts!

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