The Best Days of the Week to Advertise your Jobs

As a recruitment marketer, if you want to effectively reach and engage your target audience of job seekers, you need to do it on their terms – and time.

If you run an attractive, well-executed job advertising campaign at the wrong time, it’s not too different from spending thousands of dollars putting up a billboard on a seldom-used freeway. The result in both cases? Very few see it.

Even in today’s largely data-driven world, recruitment marketers (like many others), are often vulnerable to preconceived notions, biases, and intuition. For example, common belief points to weekends as great days to promote job ads and acquire applicants. Because, why not? You’d expect high-intent job seekers to use their weekends, when they have more time to spare than on weekdays, searching for and applying to jobs.

We sought to test this popular hypothesis by analyzing our data, which encompasses millions of jobs posted across hundreds of job categories via Joveo’s programmatic job advertising platform.

Surprisingly, our data reveals that Monday is the best day of the week to acquire applicants at a low cost per applicant (CPA), followed by Tuesday, which is on average 7.3% more expensive than Monday.

CPA rates are the lowest at the beginning of a week, and they gradually get worse toward the latter part of the week. Saturdays are the worst days to advertise your jobs, as they incur the highest cost to acquire applicants (14.7% higher average CPA relative to Mondays).

So if you’re a recruitment marketer, don’t be like Garfield. Learn to love Mondays!

We also examined how Click to Apply (CTA) rates vary during the course of a week, which threw light on one of the reasons for the observed CPA trend. Average CTA rates start high on Mondays and Tuesdays, and taper off through the course of the week – ending with their lowest values on Saturdays and Sundays (12.1% and 10.2% lower than Mondays, respectively).In other words, candidates that click on job ads are less likely to complete applications during weekends, which means advertisers have to pay a little more per applicant.

Interestingly, this is true across almost every job category (or type) we analyzed.

So here’s a pro tip. Spend aggressively on your job ads early every week. This will not only get you the lowest CPAs, but will also drive maximum visibility for you when candidates are most likely to convert to applicants, thereby ensuring a far more efficient use of your ad budget.

The idea that weekends are great days to advertise your jobs is a remnant of the bygone era of posting jobs at scale on offline channels (like Sunday Classifieds), which aimed to capitalize on the invariable spike in readership that took place over weekends. In today’s largely online job advertising ecosystem, candidate behavior has changed – and will continue to change. Recruitment marketers, therefore, must keep track of these changes by leveraging data.

This is just one example of how recruitment marketers that rely only on intuition and hearsay could run the risk of making bad decisions. They could end up spending their budgets inefficiently and suffer from subpar campaign performance.

On the other hand, when decisions are based on sound data, you gain a key competitive advantage that can potentially save hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars, while simultaneously improving performance and applicant quality.

Furthermore, using programmatic job advertising technologies such as Joveo’s can help recruitment marketers automate their campaign decisions by leveraging machine learning based algorithms that monitor trends in real time to efficiently spend, bid, and boost job ad performance – each hour of each day.

Interested in learning more? Reach out to us today!

Your data is talking… are you listening?