Where to post jobs for free: Craigslist and beyond

As you begin advertising a new job, the options may seem endless. With a plethora of both free and premium sites to post your jobs, it is crucial to be purposeful with how and where you choose to promote your new job listing. When you want to post jobs for free, it can be tempting to blast your job description across the board to get in front of as many potential candidates as possible.

However, with this approach, it’s likely that you’ll start collecting dozens, if not hundreds, of irrelevant resumes that your hiring team will have to sift through – even if you are using a customized application form. By using the best options to post a job for free that are tightly targeted to your company and the type of position you’re hiring for, you can get the highest ratio of relevant applications for the lowest cost. Beyond a Craigslist free job posting, there are several free job boards that can yield the same low-cost results.

Where to post jobs online for free:

Craigslist

Good for service workers and attracting a high volume of applicants.

Craigslist receives more than one million job listings per day, making it one of the world’s most popular job boards.

Post jobs for free on Craigslist:

In most cities, you can quickly and easily post a job to Craigslist for free. However, be aware that with great volume comes great volume: once you publish a Craigslist free job posting, anticipate emails from a high yield of unqualified candidates, recruiters, or people outside of your target location.

Tutorial: How to post jobs on Craigslist for free

Social networking sites – Facebook, Twitter

Good for attracting your company’s loyal fans.

Building your social brand can pay dividends in hiring. As you’ve likely built up a small army of loyal followers who are interested in your company and product, these are your primed audience for potential employees. If someone is already familiar with your employer brand, you’ve climbed one of the biggest hills to determine if someone is a good fit. Though other stars have to align (qualifications, location), the opportunity to make your fans into employees through recruiting on Facebook, and Twitter is deeply effective.

Related: How to post a job on Facebook

University and College Career Services

Good for students looking for internships, recent graduates, millennials.

Private and public universities have extensive career services departments that cater to their current students and alumni. If you’re looking to hire recent college graduates, reaching out to college can be a no-cost way to find students that match your company’s’ needs. Award-winning career websites like Princeton and Northeastern offer resources for students and employers alike. In addition to just a job board, working with the career counselors at these colleges can start to create a young talent pipeline that’s sustainable as your company grows.

State and Local Economic Development Sites

Good for special interest hires or government/nonprofit positions.

In an effort to control and boost their economies, all US states and many major US cities host job boards on their official websites. These sites span all industries and usually have dedicated sections for veterans, people with disabilities, or other special interests. States like Arizona and Colorado, among others, offer portals for employers to connect local job-seekers with employers. Using these will target people who are specifically looking for jobs in your location, and open you up to a demographic who are keyed into economic growth in your local area.

Free Job Listing Sites

In addition to the boards mentioned so far, there are a selection of online job boards that are regularly visited by active job seekers. When you publish a job, Workable automatically adds it to your Workable careers page, and schedules your job for publication on the free job boards available in your location, including:

• Indeed Organic Listings: the world’s #1 job site, with over 180m unique visitors every month from over 50 different countries
• LinkedIn Limited Listings: automatically advertises your job postings to LinkedIn members with profiles that would be a great match
• Simply Hired: over 30m unique visitors each month, and each year those visitors perform over 1bn job searches
• Glassdoor: a database of more than 8m company reviews, CEO approval ratings, salary reports, interview reviews and questions, benefits reviews, office photos and more
• Trovit: the leading search engine for classified ads in Europe and Latin America.
• Job Rapido: lists over 20 million jobs every month, record 35m monthly unique users, and has more than 60 million registered users 58 countries
• Recruit.net: aggregates job listings from corporate web sites, job boards, recruitment agencies and numerous other sources, operating operate 18 localized websites
• Job Is Job: a job search engine, we collect employment offers from scores of major boards. We carefully organise them and sieve out spam to produce our finished product – hundreds of thousands of quality job listings.
• Monster Limited Listings: standard ads with global provider of a full array of job seeking, career management, recruitment and talent management products and services.
• US.Jobs: part of DirectEmployers, a nonprofit member-owned and managed association formed in 2001 by leading Fortune 500 companies
• Job Inventory: search engine giving quick access to the largest selection of jobs from the widest variety of sources on the Internet
• CareerJet: career listing aggregator encompassing over 90 countries, featuring separate interfaces that are translated into 28 languages.

More resources:

• See more of our recommended places to post jobs for free.
• How to source on job boards and resume databases.