The Best Days and Times for Job Applications
Why does the time you post jobs affect job applications?
Posting job adverts at the right time can beat the competition or help reach the intended market maximising job applications. The times that people apply vary for different jobs. This can be used to help predict the best times to advertise your vacancy. People looking for work spend approximately half an hour daily. This is done through various job boards so timing this right and in the right places, can be an efficient way of boosting your coverage.
One job board has 200 million visitors monthly handling 37.5 million resumes. A surprisingly large portion of which apply either midday or dinnertime from Monday through to Wednesday. These rarely get many on Fridays and weekends. This is the active and employed group. Employed people will have a tendency to apply in the evening and rarely in the day excluding lunch time. Unemployed candidates apply more frequently during the afternoon which makes sense. Although there’s a variety of different groups the times they apply spread the traffic out, Monday, Tuesdays and sometimes Wednesdays will typically win the race of the busiest times people look for jobs online.
In summary: If you recruit for a range of positions, Monday through to Wednesday are your busiest days online. The best times to post are normally between 10-2pm or after 6 pm.
However, there you can take this concept a lot further. Variations in who applies and what times they look online could have you better off posting on different days on occasion. A good example is, if you were hiring for a graduate position, statistics show that graduates tend to follow a similar pattern to people out of work. Most apply for jobs on Monday and Tuesday, stopping from midday, and resuming in the late evening. But the most popular day that graduates have been shown to apply is Sunday evenings from 7pm onwards. If you were looking for a Graduate, having the campaign start on Sunday evening puts you at the top of the job board when they’re likely to be looking.
L J Doulton administrator
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