Job Boards: 13 Job Posting Sites Compared for Employers

This page is for employers deciding where to advertise a role: what each job board costs, what it actually delivers, and which kind of hire it suits. If you are looking for work rather than hiring, the boards below are still the right places to search, but everything here is written from the buying side.

The landscape moved sharply through 2025 and 2026, and most published guides have not caught up. Indeed now caps free direct posting at three jobs a month, each visible for 30 days. Since March 31, 2026, it also hides jobs sent in by feed unless they are sponsored, whenever the employer's applicant tracking system (ATS) could have posted them through an Indeed integration instead.

Two familiar names also changed shape. Glassdoor stopped being a separate board and now sends employers to Indeed to hire. CareerBuilder and Monster went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and their job sites were sold at auction. A guide written in 2024 will tell you to do things that no longer work.

Most roundups rank on brand recognition and quote rates that stopped being accurate in 2025. This one compares 13 job boards with pricing checked against each vendor's own pages. It explains what free actually gets you now, models advertising cost at three hires a year, covers the pay transparency rules that apply to the posting, and ends with what has to happen once someone says yes.

What changed, and why older guides mislead

Start here, because three changes invalidated a lot of standard advice, and most listicles still repeat it: Indeed changed how free and sponsored posting work, Glassdoor stopped being a separate board, and CareerBuilder and Monster went through bankruptcy. If you last shopped job boards two years ago, your assumptions are out of date in ways that cost money.

The Indeed changes matter most because Indeed is where most small employers start. Its help center states the position plainly: employers posting directly can publish up to three free jobs per calendar month in the US, each live for up to 30 days. Accounts linked to one parent company share that allowance, so five location accounts get three free jobs between them, not fifteen.

What a job board is

The job board meaning is straightforward, and so is the answer to what are job boards: a job board is a website where employers post open roles and candidates search and apply. Employers pay for placement and visibility, candidates use it free, and the board makes money on the employer side. That is the whole model, and it has been remarkably stable for thirty years even as the individual brands have risen and collapsed.

Two things are frequently confused with job boards and are not. A job search engine or job aggregator, such as Google for Jobs, hosts no listings at all: it indexes them from employer career pages and other boards using structured data (code on the page that labels it as a job listing).

The second is an applicant tracking system, which manages candidates after they apply and typically distributes your posting to several boards at once. Understanding which of the three you are looking at prevents most of the confusion in this category.

Types of job boards

Online job boards divide into four types, and matching the type to the role does more for candidate quality than raising the advertising budget.

The tradeoff is consistent. General boards give you volume and, increasingly, volume is the problem rather than the solution, since AI-assisted applications have driven up quantity without improving fit. Niche boards give you fewer applicants who are closer to the role. For a small business without someone whose job is screening, fewer and better is usually the right trade.

How to post a job, step by step

Posting a job well comes down to the eight steps below, and most of them happen before you pick a board. Where to post gets most of the attention, but the same ad appears on every board, so the writing is the part of the whole exercise that pays off most.

13 job boards at a glance

The table below covers the boards a US small employer would realistically consider, with what each costs after the 2025 and 2026 changes wherever the vendor's own pages confirm a price.

How we evaluated these job boards

We judged every board on the four tests below, not on brand recognition or on pricing that stopped being accurate in 2025.

The volume leaders

Four options carry most US hiring traffic. For a general role these are where you start, with the caveat that Indeed's free tier is considerably thinner than it used to be.

Indeed calls itself the world's number one job site, citing comScore visit data, and it is the default job board most US employers try first. Reach is its main strength, the employer dashboard is straightforward, and for a general role in a populated area a sponsored Indeed post will produce applications quickly.

The economics are tighter for small employers than older guides suggest. The free cap of three jobs a month and the 30-day visibility window are the obvious limits. Sponsored pricing has no published floor: Indeed's own guidance says the minimum is dynamic, set for each job based on local job seekers and competing bids, and you are billed per click or per started application.

The March 31, 2026 feed policy adds a narrower rule: if your applicant tracking system could post jobs through an Indeed integration, the same jobs sent through a single-source feed show only when sponsored. Beyond cost, application quality is the recurring complaint: hiring managers often report that many applicants fail basic qualification screens.

LinkedIn is where professional candidates already are, which is the whole argument. A posting sits next to the candidate's network, employees can share it, and passive candidates who are not actively searching still see it. For salaried roles above entry level it consistently produces better-qualified applicants than the general boards, even at lower volume.

The free tier is genuinely limited to one live role at a time, so a company hiring two positions simultaneously is paying for at least one. Promotion runs on a budget you set and is charged per click. In LinkedIn's own example, a $10 daily budget costs $300 or less over 30 days.

LinkedIn is also a poor fit for hourly, shift, and trades roles, where the candidate population is simply not on the platform in the same way.

Google for Jobs is not a board; it is a search feature that surfaces listings from career pages and boards directly in search results. That distinction is why it is free: Google is indexing your page rather than hosting your listing. Once your career page publishes correct JobPosting structured data, every role appears with no per-post cost and no monthly limit, in the place a large share of job searches begins.

The requirement is a real one. Someone has to implement the structured data, and if your careers page is a PDF or a paragraph on the about page, that work has to happen first. Most modern applicant tracking systems publish the markup automatically, which is one of the practical arguments for using one. There is also no dashboard, no applicant management, and no support: it is distribution and nothing else.

ZipRecruiter's proposition is distribution plus matching: one posting syndicates to a large partner network, and its matching engine pushes the role to candidates rather than waiting for them to search. For an employer who does not want to manage several board accounts, that consolidation has real value, and the matching genuinely surfaces candidates the general boards miss.

Pricing opacity is the problem for a small buyer. ZipRecruiter's 2025 annual report describes flat-rate plans on terms from a day to a year alongside per-click campaigns capped per job. We could not confirm a current rate from the company, so we do not repeat the third-party estimates in circulation. On a time-based plan, three hires a year can work out considerably more expensive per hire than pay-per-click.

Free job posting sites that still work

Free job posting sites still exist and still work; they just are not the ones most guides name. Indeed narrowing its own free tier changed which options are worth using, and two free layers are consistently overlooked.

The state job bank is the genuinely underused one. Every US state runs one through its workforce agency, posting is free, and covered federal contractors already carry a mandatory listing obligation there under VEVRAA, the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act.

Together with Google for Jobs and a well-built career page, the state job bank makes it possible to run a small hiring program at zero advertising cost. That was true before the Indeed changes and is more valuable now.

Wellfound, formerly AngelList Talent, is the strongest free option for startup hiring and one of the few boards where free means genuinely free rather than restricted. Its condition is pay transparency: listings must show salary and, where relevant, equity, which self-selects for candidates comfortable with that and saves a conversation later.

The audience is narrow by design. If you are hiring a bookkeeper, a warehouse supervisor, or a dental assistant, this is the wrong board and posting there is wasted effort. Its candidate base also skews toward people who want startup risk, which is an advantage for a seed-stage company and a mismatch for an established small business offering stability.

SimplyHired is a general board with a free posting tier and a wide aggregated index. The important detail is that employer posting now runs through Indeed. SimplyHired's own posting page says a job posted there, free or sponsored, also appears on Indeed, so it is no longer a distinct channel at all.

SimplyHired also sits within the same corporate group as Indeed and Glassdoor, so what looks like a diversified posting strategy across three brands is one owner. It generates less volume than Indeed and offers little in the way of employer tooling. For a small business it is best treated as free additional coverage, posted once alongside your main channel rather than managed actively.

Craigslist remains genuinely effective for local hiring in trades, hospitality, service, and general labor, and its flat per-post fee is the most predictable pricing in this comparison. For a landscaping business or a restaurant hiring in one city, it frequently outperforms boards with far more sophisticated technology.

There is no employer tooling of any kind, no applicant management, and no screening, so applications arrive as email. Quality varies widely and scam and spam responses are a known issue. It is a classified ad, priced and functioning like one, which is the right tool for some roles and completely wrong for others.

Niche and specialty job boards

Matching the board to the role is the highest-return decision in this whole comparison. A niche board delivers fewer applicants who are far closer to the requirement, which matters most when nobody in your company has time to screen a hundred resumes.

Dice has served technology hiring since before most general boards existed, and its value is filtering: candidates are searchable by stack, certification, and clearance in ways a general board cannot match, and the audience is technical rather than technical-adjacent. Salary benchmarking data and applicant tracking integrations come with it.

There is no free tier at all, and at $399 for a single 30-day job slot it is the most expensive single posting with a published price in this comparison. For one senior engineering role where a mis-hire is costly, that is defensible. For a generalist role that happens to touch technology, it is not, and Wellfound or LinkedIn will reach a comparable audience for less.

Handshake owns the campus lane through direct partnerships with universities, which is why it reaches students that no general board does: the account comes through their school rather than their own job search. Basic employer posting is free, making it one of the genuinely no-cost options here, and campus recruiters treat it as the board that matters for internships and graduate programs.

It is a weak fit for experienced hiring. Handshake now promotes an alumni audience alongside students, but its reach is built on campus partnerships, so the audience skews early-career. Students also apply in bulk, so set up response templates and a screening approach before you post rather than after two hundred applications arrive. Pairing it with the school career center produces better results than posting alone.

Snagajob is the specialist for hourly and shift work. It now sits inside JobGet alongside Seasoned, a restaurant and hospitality network, and JobGet says the combined network reaches more than 100 million everyday workers. JobGet pitches that combined offer at employers with 50 or more open roles who hire at high volume.

Before you buy, check which hiring tools your plan includes, such as applicant tracking, interview scheduling, onboarding, and employment verification, since JobGet now markets the three brands as a single employer solution. We could not confirm current paid rates from Snagajob directly, so none is quoted here. Sign-up is free, which lets you check the rate inside the account before committing.

Snagajob is narrow by design: posting a salaried professional role here wastes the fee. Reach is also concentrated in the sectors it serves, so an hourly role outside restaurants, retail, or warehousing gets less benefit.

FlexJobs has operated since 2007 and its differentiator is hand-screening: every listing is checked for legitimacy before it publishes, which is why candidates pay to use it and why the audience trusts what they find. Everyone there is looking for remote or flexible work, which suits a company hiring several remote positions at once.

Two limits matter. The vetting applies to listings, not candidates: FlexJobs checks that your job is real but does not screen who applies, so screening remains entirely your work. And FlexJobs is not an employer of record, so it handles no payroll or compliance.

Pricing is the open question. We could not confirm FlexJobs' current employer terms, so get the price in writing, and if you hire one remote role a year, compare it with one sponsored post elsewhere.

Other specialty boards worth knowing

The boards below are named so you can find the right channel for a specific role. They are not individually reviewed here, because for most small employers they are situational rather than part of a standing strategy.

Two of those deserve emphasis. The state job bank costs nothing to use, yet most small employers never touch it. And on diversity boards, the posting language itself is part of the pipeline question: a listing that never addresses diversity commitments keeps returning the profile it always returned.

International job boards raise a bigger question than which site to use. Outside the US the strongest boards are regional rather than global, so the country decides the channel. The harder problem is how you will employ the person: a local entity, a contractor agreement, or an employer of record. Settle that before you advertise.

Job boards that changed status

Two names you will find recommended in older guides are no longer what those guides describe. Both are worth understanding rather than simply avoiding.

Glassdoor's employer site now puts it plainly: grow your employer brand with Glassdoor, hire with Indeed. Recruit Holdings, which owns both, cut about 1,300 jobs across its Indeed and Glassdoor segment in July 2025.

Glassdoor continues as an employer branding and review platform, and that role is genuinely important: candidates check it before applying and before accepting, and an unanswered one-star review does more damage than a weak job ad.

What Glassdoor is not anymore is a separate place to post. If a guide tells you to advertise on Glassdoor as a distinct channel from Indeed, it predates the change. Treat Glassdoor as reputation management: claim the profile, respond to reviews, keep the company page current.

CareerBuilder and Monster merged in September 2024 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware nine months later, on June 24, 2025, estimating liabilities of $100 million to $500 million on the petition. The job board business was sold at the bankruptcy auction to Bold Holdings, and the media properties went to a separate buyer.

CareerBuilder no longer functions as a standalone posting channel. Paid posts on Monster+, the pay-as-you-go plan Monster already offered before the filing, cross-post there automatically. Its rate, from $8 a day per job, is one of the few published paid rates in this comparison, and the legacy audience has not disappeared.

The honest caveat is platform risk: a business that has just been through Chapter 11 and changed ownership is a different proposition from an established one, and traffic stability after a restructuring is not guaranteed. Treat Monster+ as a secondary channel while the new ownership settles.

What posting a job actually costs

The table below models advertising spend for a small business hiring three roles a year, each advertised for 30 days. It covers the board fee only, which is the smaller half of what hiring costs.

Two things stand out. Free is still achievable if your hiring is low volume and you have a career page publishing structured data. In that case, Google for Jobs plus the Indeed free tier plus one LinkedIn post covers three roles a year at no advertising cost at all.

Paid reach, on the other hand, is harder to budget than it looks. Indeed and LinkedIn both set their minimums per job rather than publishing a floor, so the only fixed paid prices in the table are Monster+ at $8 a day, Dice at $399 a slot, and the Craigslist flat fee.

Working out which board actually produced the hire

The only way to know which board produced a hire is to track the source yourself, because the boards cannot: they report clicks and applications, not which channel produced the person you hired six weeks later. Almost nobody does this, and it is the reason subscriptions renew for years without evidence.

The minimum viable version is one spreadsheet column: where did you see this role. Ask it on every application, record the answer at offer stage, and after three or four hires you will know which board to keep paying for. Without it, the renewal decision is made on brand recognition, which is exactly what the boards are counting on.

This matters more with per-post and subscription pricing than with pay-per-click. A $400 monthly subscription that produced no hires in a year is a $4,800 mistake nobody noticed, while a sponsored campaign that produced nothing is at least visible in the spend report.

Ghost jobs and why your postings might look like them

A ghost job is a listing kept live with no real intent to hire, and it has become common enough that candidates now assume it. That assumption affects your postings whether or not you have ever posted one deliberately.

The scale is genuinely contested. The Congressional Research Service put it plainly in April 2025: there are no official statistics on the magnitude of ghost jobs (CRS In Focus IF12977). Every published estimate comes from one platform counting its own listings, which is why the numbers in circulation disagree and none of them can be checked against an official source.

Three practical consequences follow for an employer acting in good faith. Close postings promptly and verify the closure reached every board. Do not leave evergreen listings live for pipeline building without saying so, since that is exactly the behavior candidates now penalize. And watch the state bills rather than Congress.

As of the April 2025 CRS brief, no bill explicitly addressing ghost postings had been introduced in Congress. Legislators in New Jersey, Kentucky, and California, by contrast, had introduced measures that would make employers disclose whether a posting is for a real vacancy.

New York has since gone further. In June 2026 its legislature passed S8877, which would require employers with at least 100 employees, and third-party job posting sites, to state on each ad whether it is for a current vacancy. The bill had not become law by late September 2026.

Pay transparency and what belongs in the posting

The job posting itself is now a regulated document in a growing number of states, and getting it wrong is a compliance issue rather than a marketing one.

Published counts of pay transparency laws disagree with each other, because some sources fold in salary history bans, city ordinances, and laws that have passed but are not yet in force. The narrower list is the one that governs a posting: 14 states and the District of Columbia require the range in the advertisement itself, counting Connecticut from October 1, 2026.

Nevada and Rhode Island instead hand the range to the applicant during the process: after a completed interview in Nevada, and on request in Rhode Island.

Three of the fourteen have 2026 start dates: Virginia from July 1, Maine from July 29 for employers with 10 or more employees, and Connecticut from October 1. Connecticut's new rule adds the range and a general description of benefits to every internal and public job advertisement, on top of its existing rule of giving applicants the range on request.

Two thresholds are worth knowing by name. California applies at 15 or more employees, while Virginia and Maryland set no headcount threshold at all, so a three-person company advertising a role performed in either state is covered.

The safest operating position for a small employer hiring across state lines is to include a range on every posting, because working out which rule applies to a remote role is harder than simply complying everywhere. This is general information rather than legal advice; confirm with employment counsel.

Job boards vs hiring platforms and recruiting sites

Searches for hiring platforms, hiring websites, best hiring websites, recruiting sites, and best recruiting websites return a mixture of job boards and software, because the categories genuinely overlap. Separating them clarifies what you are buying.

The two are complementary rather than alternatives: platforms distribute to boards, and boards feed platforms. For a company hiring a handful of people a year, posting directly on two or three boards and tracking candidates in a spreadsheet works perfectly well.

Indeed's March 2026 feed policy changes that only for employers already on an integrated system: jobs they push through a single-source feed now show only when sponsored, so posting through the integration becomes the free route.

Two adjacent categories are worth separating from the boards themselves. Job posting services distribute one ad to several boards for a single fee, which saves setup time and hides which channel actually worked unless you insist on per-board tracking. Job posting apps, where a board offers one, are a convenience layer on the same listing rather than a separate market.

A note if you are searching rather than hiring

Searches for company hiring, companies hiring near me, and online job postings mostly come from candidates rather than employers, and this page will not help with those directly. The short version for anyone who landed here looking for work: the boards above are where the listings are, Indeed and LinkedIn carry the most, and niche boards carry the best-matched roles for your field.

There is an employer-side lesson in that traffic, though, and it is worth taking. Candidates searching company hiring and browsing online job postings are looking at your company page, your reviews, and your salary range before they apply. A posting with no range, on an unclaimed employer profile, next to unanswered negative reviews, competes badly against one that has all three sorted, regardless of which board it sits on.

What happens after the hire

Every board on this page stops working the moment a candidate accepts. What starts at that point is a separate process with federal deadlines attached, and it is where small employers most often lose the time they saved on advertising.

Form I-9 is the one that carries real exposure. It applies to every new hire regardless of company size, the employer section is due within three business days of the start date, and civil penalties for paperwork violations run from $288 to $2,861 for each individual the violation involves.

This form is entirely routine to get right if there is a process, and entirely easy to miss if the start date arrives while everyone is still celebrating the hire.

How to choose where to post

Five questions settle this faster than reading another ranked list, and the first one matters more than which board tops anyone's chart.

A closing note on strategy: post to fewer boards and put the saved effort into the job description itself. Every board in this comparison shows candidates the same text, and a clear, specific, honest description outperforms a vague one on every channel simultaneously.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a job board?

A website where employers post open roles and candidates search and apply. Employers pay for placement; candidates use it free. Two things are often confused with it: a job search engine such as Google for Jobs indexes listings from career pages rather than hosting them, and an applicant tracking system manages candidates after they apply and usually distributes postings to several boards. Boards bring you applicants; the ATS organizes them.

What are the best job boards for employers?

For most US small businesses the shortlist is Indeed for volume, LinkedIn for salaried and professional roles, and Google for Jobs, which is free if your career page publishes structured data. Beyond that, match the board to the role: Wellfound for startups, Dice for engineering, Handshake for graduates, Snagajob for hourly, FlexJobs for remote. Posting everywhere is not a strategy, since a role that fits a niche board reaches better candidates there than buried in a general feed.

Are job boards still free?

Partly, with conditions. Indeed allows three free direct posts per company each calendar month, each live for up to 30 days, and since March 31, 2026, jobs sent by feed appear only when sponsored if the employer's applicant tracking system has an Indeed integration. LinkedIn allows one free live post at a time. Google for Jobs stays free with valid structured data, and Wellfound, SimplyHired, Handshake, and Snagajob keep free entry points.

How much does it cost to post a job?

Free options exist, but paid reach has no single price anymore. Indeed and LinkedIn set paid minimums per job; LinkedIn's own example puts a $10 daily budget at $300 or less for 30 days. Monster+ starts at $8 a day, Dice charges $399 per 30-day slot, and Craigslist charges a flat $10 to $75 by area. Three roles a year can cost anywhere from nothing to over a thousand dollars.

What is the difference between a job board and a hiring platform?

A job board is a marketplace for listings; a hiring platform is software that manages the process around them, including distribution, applications, screening, scheduling, and tracking to offer. The overlap comes from boards adding platform features and platforms adding board distribution, which is why searches for hiring platforms and recruiting sites return both. A board answers where do I advertise; a platform answers how do I run the process.

Do I need an applicant tracking system to post jobs?

No. Indeed's free allowance covers jobs posted directly on the site, and its March 2026 feed change only affects employers who send single-source feeds while their applicant tracking system has an Indeed integration: they must post through the integration or sponsor. For a company hiring a handful of people a year, posting directly on each board is practical. Past roughly a dozen hires a year, or once more than one person reviews candidates, coordination cost usually exceeds the cost of software.

Do I have to include a salary range in the job posting?

It depends where the role is based. The range belongs in the advertisement itself across 14 states and the District of Columbia, with Connecticut joining on October 1, 2026: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. Washington backs its rule with statutory damages of $100 to $5,000 per violation, which is the sort of number that settles the argument. Because a remote role can trigger obligations in any state where work may be performed, many employers now include a range on every posting as policy. This is general information, not legal advice.

What happens after a candidate accepts the offer?

Federal paperwork begins immediately. Form I-9 is required for every new hire regardless of company size, with the employee section completed by their first day and the employer section within three business days of them starting. Form W-4 is required for withholding, and state equivalents may apply. The offer letter needs signing and storing, policies need acknowledging, and access and training have to be arranged. The board delivered a candidate; converting them into an employee is a separate process with its own deadlines.