The Best Time To Post Jobs on LinkedIn—An Updated Guide

There’s no question about it—LinkedIn is the most popular career platform in the world. Did you know that hundreds of millions of professionals from over 200 countries use LinkedIn for professional networking?

In practice, that makes LinkedIn the biggest virtual job market on the planet. For companies that are eager to find quality candidates online, it’s a godsend—especially because the LinkedIn job posting cost is $0, at least for non-promoted content.

However, recruiters often find that LinkedIn’s popularity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you can find professionals in any niche because everyone uses LinkedIn. But on the other—everyone uses LinkedIn, which means the competition among employers is also huge. 

While it’s more formal than Facebook or Instagram, let’s not forget—LinkedIn is still a social network. If you want the maximum number of people to see your posts, you should time them correctly. Job ads are no exception. 

We’ve prepared an extensive guide to picking the best time to post a job on LinkedIn—so let’s dive in! 

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Choosing the Best Time To Post Job Ads on LinkedIn—What Do I Need To Know?

Most social media professionals agree that the best time to post jobs on LinkedIn is from around 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. 

As you may have guessed, things aren’t as simple as that. You need to determine the best time to post every individual job ad on LinkedIn—the rule is not set in stone. Here’s how we arrived at that exact time span.

Social Media and Timing—A General Overview

Let’s start with the basics—as we’ve shrewdly pointed out already, LinkedIn is a social network. Not exactly a Pulitzer-worthy conclusion, but it’s still important to remember for one simple reason—all social networks are a popularity contest.

Your content—including your job ads—competes with the content of countless other companies worldwide. Sure, you can set a budget for promoting a job post on LinkedIn and try to outbid your competition. But that doesn’t mean posting your job ad at the right time isn’t important. 

It’s not hard to conclude why timing is vital for engagement on social media. New LinkedIn posts and job ads appear every minute of every day—and in the internet age, yesterday may very well have been a century ago. People are constantly bombarded with new content. 

Your best bet is to post when people are most likely using their social networks. However, the specific period depends on two crucial factors:

1. Your social network—People don’t use all social media platforms in the same way and at the same time intervals. For example, people might use Twitter for a few minutes to post a quick joke, while a LinkedIn post usually comes with much more forethought. The timing of the posts differs as well
2. Your target audience—Different people use social media at varying times of the day. For instance, school-age kids might go on Instagram before and after school or even during a particularly boring class. Employed adults are more likely to go online before and after work

What Does This Mean for LinkedIn Job Posting? 

Here’s where things get a bit more complex. As a platform primarily intended for professional networking, LinkedIn is starkly different from most other social media platforms in one crucial way—LinkedIn wasn’t designed to be used during downtime.

Even particularly career-minded people aren’t likely to get off work on a Wednesday evening and start scrolling through LinkedIn posts about work.  

So, you can eliminate weekends as the optimal time for posting on LinkedIn. People usually reserve Saturdays for their hobbies, quality time with their loved ones, and various family activities. The same goes for Sundays—you’re winding down from whatever you did the day before and getting ready for work tomorrow. 

What is the best day to post jobs on LinkedIn? Well, it’s not a single day—it’s Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. 

Why not Monday and Friday? Professionals usually use Mondays to respond to emails received during the weekend and plan what they will do for the rest of the work week. On Fridays, they’re busy finishing their tasks for the week—once they’re done, they aren’t likely to start browsing jobs. 

If you’re a remote-first company that hires people from around the world, timing your LinkedIn job posts doesn’t make much sense because of huge time zone differences—someone’s 9 a.m. is someone else’s middle of the night. You should adjust your time zones appropriately when hiring from a specific geographic area. 

Timing LinkedIn Job Ads and Regular Posts—Is There A Difference?

So far, we’ve covered when the best time to post on LinkedIn is. It’s also important to note the difference between job postings and regular LinkedIn posts, which can impact your timing. 

When people and companies upload ordinary LinkedIn posts, those usually come in the form of:

• Blog posts—Usually describing personal views or research on matters relevant to a specific industry and the user’s LinkedIn connections
• Videos—Businesses often use them to promote their brand and company culture to potential employees
• Third-party content—LinkedIn is all about connections, making it the perfect platform for cross-promotion between professionals and companies

You may have noticed we’ve left job ads out of that list. There’s a good reason for that—job ads are an entirely separate content category, regardless of whether they’re free or sponsored. 

And on LinkedIn, only sponsored ads appear in the feeds of many qualified applicants. Free ads only appear in search results, which means they don’t target passive job candidates who aren’t actively looking for work. 

How does this affect your timing? When you post a job on a LinkedIn company page, it’s a common practice to share your job ad in a post to increase engagement. That’s especially true if it’s a free LinkedIn job posting because of its limited reach compared to a sponsored post. 

So, even though job ads are separate from posts on LinkedIn, you’ll likely use posts to promote them. For example, here’s a post from an Atlassian (of Jira fame) employee that does just that:

That’s why knowing when to post on LinkedIn, in general, is important for job ads as well. 

The Best Time To Post Jobs on LinkedIn—Frequently Asked Questions

We hope our guide has given you some valuable info for the next time you post jobs on LinkedIn! With that in mind, we’ve also answered some of the most frequently asked questions about the best time to post jobs on LinkedIn. 

How Often Should I Post on LinkedIn?

According to HubSpot’s research, it’s not a good idea to post on LinkedIn more than five times a week—anything past that, and you’ve gone over the point of diminishing returns. 

Keep in mind that this is the “maximum” recommended number of posts; you can still choose to post less.

Anything between two and five posts a week is acceptable—though this number can vary depending on your audience, industry, and the kind of content you’re publishing.

LinkedIn hasn’t released any official content guidelines on this. Still, anything above the five-posts mark is likely detrimental to your engagement metrics from the standpoint of the LinkedIn feed algorithm. As a result, LinkedIn might show your posts to your audience less often. Like any other social media platform, it prioritizes quality content. 

That’s why the only golden rule here is not to prioritize quantity over quality, especially when writing posts for a company page, where you carefully need to weigh every word and ensure it carries the brand’s voice. After all, there’s a reason major corporations hire LinkedIn profile writers to handle their content. 

Merely sticking to the “five posts” rule isn’t enough either; you need to ensure you’re posting informative, original, and varied content. Maintain a mix of different types of content—here’s an example of a decent weekly content plan:

What Are Some Alternatives to LinkedIn?

Right now, LinkedIn is one of the premier job boards in the world. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try other popular alternatives. The wider you cast your net, the more qualified candidates you’ll get from your job ads. With that in mind, here are a couple of suggestions for LinkedIn alternatives:

• Monster
• Facebook
• Snagajob
• Careerjet
• Indeed
• Dice
• Mashable
• Google for Jobs
• Craigslist
• CareerBuilder
• Ladders
• ZipRecruiter
• Juju

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