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.
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.
How to post a LinkedIn Job Ad for Free
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 weekendsas 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.
Best Time To Post Jobs on LinkedIn
Tuesday
Thursday
Wednesday
8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
9 a.m. to 12 p.m.
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.
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:
Example of LinkedIn Content Plan
Monday
Video content
Tuesday
Blog post covering a relevant topic
Wednesday
Thought leadership piece that builds authority
Thursday
Short, thought-provoking status that drives engagement through feedback in the comments
Friday
Infographic
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:
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