You want your job ads to reach the widest possible audience. But the moment you start looking for job sites to post your ads on, you’ll quickly realise that talent attraction can be expensive. Many job boards only offer paid (premium) job listings.
And if you’re an SMB with a limited budget, these paid portals can quickly become too expensive to manage. That’s where free job boards come in. These kinds of job posting sites allow you to post jobs for free, so everyone can use them! So, where to publish those ads for free?
Below, we list the best free job posting sites (all international) to cost-effectively improve your talent attraction efforts in 2023. All these job boards offer completely free job posting solutions for employers, meaning that you can start recruiting talent straight away, regardless of your budget.
6 best free job boards and job posting sites in 2023
1. LinkedIn
As the world’s largest professional social networking platform, LinkedIn offers the chance to reach a vast audience of potential candidates. With over 750 million members this free job board offers the biggest possible talent pool.
LinkedIn is a generalist job board, meaning it offers a high reach and the ability to attract candidates regardless of the job role you’re hiring for.
As an employer, you can post jobs on this job board for free or you can further promote your job postings using the premium bundles available with JOIN.
2. XING
XING offers the perfect solution If you want to target (German-speaking) candidates in the DACH region specifically. With 19 million members it is one of the largest professional social networking sites in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.
Although most popular in the DACH countries, XING is not just restricted to this region as it is available in 12 different languages and used by professionals in over 200 countries. Since it’s a generalist job board, you can reach a varied audience of both active job seekers and passive talent within any industry.
With JOIN, you can post your job ad on XING for free while simultaneously multiposting the same job ad across different free job boards as well.
3. Indeed
Unlike LinkedIn and XING, which are technically social networking sites, Indeed is a dedicated job search engine that aggregates job listings from a wide range of sources.
Indeed’s site is available in 28 different languages with job postings listed in more than 60 countries across the globe.
Job posting is available for free on this job board, although they do also offer premium listings (called Indeed Sponsored Job ads) that help you gain better visibility for your job adverts.
4. Arbeitnow
This Berlin-based free job board helps you attract talent from all over the world. Arbeitnow is primarily aimed at posting job openings for the German and European markets. However, since they also have a strong focus on remote job posts potential employees can be attracted from across the globe.
Aside from both local and remote jobs, the platform has a further focus on hybrid work and roles that offer a 4-day workweek as well. That said, Arbeitnow is still considered a generalist job board where you can post any type of job opening.
With more than 117,000 monthly visits this free job board can help you significantly increase the reach and visibility of your job ads. With JOIN, you can benefit from both free and premium job placements on Arbeitnow.
5. Talent.com
The fifth site on our list of the best free job boards for employers in 2023 is Talent.com. This employment platform is another aggregator, like Indeed, collecting job posts from across the web.
Globally, the website boasts some impressive figures, with 35+ million jobs posted monthly and 60+ million users accessing the platform every month.
There is the option to post job ads for free on Talent.com and you can easily target different international audiences. Moreover, when further sponsoring the ad with JOIN you can increase the visibility of your job ad and reach even more qualified candidates.
6. Google for Jobs
Google for Jobs is a bit different from the rest of the free job sites on this list. Not only is Google for Jobs a free job search engine rather than a job board (like Talent.com), but since it’s part of Google, your job will show up directly in the search results of the search engine.
This means that, technically, your job ads have the potential of reaching 4 billion users in the world. However, optimising your job ad for it to rank better on Google can be a difficult and time-consuming task, for which you might need additional resources. For example, you need to optimise your job posting with structured data (unless posting through JOIN).
But the fact that Google for Jobs is free of charge and offers the largest audience in the world does make it an important job board to post your jobs on.
How to use these free job posting sites
The list above highlights the best free job boards for employers in 2023. But to make the most of these job sites and to ensure your job ads perform well, you need to know how job posting works.
To find out how to actually post to these sites using JOIN, check out our dedicated post job ads for free page.
Why you might consider premium job boards
The free job platforms mentioned above offer a great starting point. You might be an SMB without a budget for recruitment. Or maybe you’re not in hurry to find a candidate and you just want to test the waters.
But if you need to fill a position sooner rather than later, you might want to use the benefits of premium (paid) job listings. By paying for your job ads—whether on dedicated paid job boards or by paying to promote ads on free job boards—you can give your listings a significant boost.
This helps you attract the right talent faster and—when in a hurry—more efficiently. At JOIN, we offer premium listings on a range of job boards to help you better promote your job ads:
