Free Job Posting Options Slowly Taking Root

A question was recently posted to one of the discussion lists operated by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The college career service office professional started by writing that she remembers from the Golden Parachute books that about 10 percent of job openings were advertised and then asked if that number was still correct.
I suspect that the percentages must be far higher now because virtually every organization of any size has a web site and the cost of publishing a job to those web sites is essentially zero. In addition, there are a number of high traffic job board which accept postings for free, including Indeed, SimplyHired, and most of the Craigslist sites. Then there are sites such as LinkUp, which takes postings from many corporate employer sites and aggregates them so they’re all available in one place. Of course, virtually every posting everywhere is also a click away at search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. In addition, employers who want to post their jobs to CollegeRecruiter.com may now choose to pay $175 for 60 days or pay only when they receive qualified applications under our new pay-per-resume job posting option.
My best guess is that about 75 percent of job openings are now advertised, although many of those are advertised for free. From the perspective of the candidate, whether a job posting is paid for or free isn’t very important.