Which is the best day of the week to post an advert on a Job Board?

Our busy part of the week tends to be a Friday afternoon. I suspect Friday morning is a good time for many of our clients to do weekly meetings and decisions get made on new vacancies that they need to recruit for. By the afternoon, we are normally in full swing turning their job descriptions into optimised advert copy for the job boards we use.

Our clients may be keen to get these adverts live by the weekend, but we’ll tend to advise against posting vacancies on a Friday. Customers can always disregard this advice, but there is a logic behind it.

When posting a vacancy on a job board there are two primary methods by which a candidate can discover it, both methods are less effective if you post on a Friday, and here’s why…

Job Search

Many job boards will display the more recent adverts at the top of the search results. Now I am generalising here, some job boards treat adverts equally regardless of when they were posted, and just try to deliver the most relevant advert to the top of the list based on the search term, but the majority will have some bias towards newer postings.

This means if we post your advert on Friday, your advert will perform best when searched for on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. These are the 3 days of the week when people are least likely to think about job hunting, and this is backed up by the audience figures to all the major job boards on these days. Also, did I mention that Friday is typically the busiest day for posting jobs? So post on Friday and you will have the most competition, competing for the smallest audience.

Jobseekers and Email Alerts

The second method is when a job seeker discovers your vacancy by setting up a job alert with the job board. Normally, after a jobseeker runs a search, the job board will offer them the chance to have the results of this job search emailed to them every day, saving them having to remember to return and run this search daily. If we post our advert for your vacancy on a Friday, then the jobseeker would normally get an email from the job board on Saturday morning.

I check my emails 24/7, it’s like a nervous twitch, whenever I stand in a queue or have to wait for something I have to check my email on my iphone. But will your potential new employee have the time to check their email on Saturday? Even if they do are they really going to have time to apply for your position?


Why we do like Mondays

So what is the best day of the week to post a role? Ideally you want to be posting your jobs the day before job board traffic hits its peak. According to all the job boards I have spoken to over several years, it’s Monday. This is backed up by most UK job board traffic peaking on a Tuesday. I have also previously heard from Jobsite that their traffic peaks at around 11am on this day.


Our Stats for June

We managed 98 vacancies in June, generating 24,059 applications, a whopping 245.5 applicants per role for us to screen out all the irrelevant candidates from.

Our friends at Idibu (our job board posting partner) were good enough to send us the figures on when these applications were made. The graph below shows applications dropping off severely over the weekend and peaking on Tuesday, backing up the Monday posting argument. The second chart shows the peak hours of the day for applications.