Publishing a job to job boards

Choose where a job is advertised, set when it goes live and when it expires, and manage each posting afterwards.

A job reaches candidates through its postings. Each posting is one job on one channel: your careers page, your internal careers page, or an external job board such as Adzuna or Reed. You choose the channels when you publish, and you can add, remove and re-publish them later from the job. This article covers that whole cycle. Connecting a board's credentials is covered in "Managing job board integrations", and fixing a posting that has failed is covered in "Troubleshooting failed job board postings".

Who can do this

Publishing, adding boards, unpublishing, re-publishing and bulk publishing are limited to System Admin and HR users. Other roles cannot complete these actions. Hiring managers who only hold that role on a job do not see the Job Boards tab on it, and the Job Boards page in the main menu is for System Admin and HR only.

Before you start, two things must be true:

• The job has finished approval and job setup. Its status is Approved, or you are on the final Publishing step of setup.
• Any external board you want has been connected and switched on by a System Admin under Settings > Integrations. Boards that are not connected, are still pending or are switched off do not appear as choices. The Company Careers Page always appears.

What a job needs before it can be published

These fields must be filled in on the job: Job title, Description, Job type, Location, Postcode, Country, Region, City and Salary from. Publishing to any external board also needs an Industry sector. Publishing to your careers pages only does not.

If something is missing, publishing stops and a red message lists each missing field, followed by "Add the missing details on the job's Edit page, then try publishing again." Fix the job, then publish again.

Publishing at the end of job setup

The last step of Job Setup is Publishing. It follows the application form, team and pipeline steps.

1. Under Publishing Channels, tick the channels you want. Boards that cost nothing to use carry a Free badge. Where your organisation does not use the Internal Careers Page, the Company Careers Page is ticked and locked so every job has a careers page. If your organisation has switched the Internal Careers Page on, you choose which careers page or pages the job appears on.
2. Set the Posting date if the job should go live later. Leave it empty to publish as soon as you complete setup. A date more than about five minutes ahead schedules the job. The furthest you can schedule is one year ahead.
3. Set the Expiry date. It starts 28 days after the posting date (or 28 days from today when there is no posting date). The expiry cannot be earlier than the posting date; the step shows "Expiry date must be on or after the posting date."
4. Check the Publishing Summary, which lists the channels you chose. Use Preview as Candidate to open the advert as a candidate will see it in a new tab.
5. Select the button at the bottom right, which reads Complete Setup & Publish or Complete Setup.

The job becomes Published, or Scheduled if you gave a future posting date. If you have no external boards connected, the step shows "No job board integrations configured" with a Manage integrations link, and the job goes to your careers page only.

Boards that carry a charge, or that need board-specific choices such as Reed, S1jobs and JobsGoPublic, are best published from the job page once setup is complete. The dialog described below is where you confirm the charge and complete those options.

Publishing from the job page

If a job is Approved and has not been published, publish it from the job itself.

1. Open the job and select Publish at the top right.
2. In the Publish to Job Boards dialog, every connected board is ticked when it opens. Untick the ones you do not want. On an organisation without the Internal Careers Page, the Company Careers Page stays ticked and shows "(always included)". If the Internal Careers Page is on, you can untick either careers page, but the dialog will not let you publish with none.
3. Complete any Board Options that appear under a ticked board (see the next section).
4. If any ticked board is a paid one, tick the acknowledgement: "I understand that publishing to [boards] may use a paid credit or incur a charge." The Publish button stays disabled until you do.
5. Check the Expiry date. It starts as the job's closing date, or 28 days from today if the job has none. It uses your local time zone. If the job has no closing date, the date you set here is saved as the job's closing date.
6. Select Publish (N boards). A confirmation reads "Job published to selected boards successfully."

This dialog has no posting date. To schedule a job for a future date, use the Publishing step of setup instead.

The paid boards are IrishJobs.ie, Reed, TotalJobs, CV-Library, S1jobs, JobsGoPublic and CharityJob. Your careers pages, Indeed, LinkedIn Limited, Adzuna, Find a Job (GOV.UK) and Astronaut Jobs do not need the acknowledgement.

Board-specific options

Some boards ask for extra choices under their name once you tick them. The Publish button stays disabled while a required choice is empty.

• S1jobs: Posting company, Inventory product(s) and Core skill are required. Specialism(s) are optional. You can combine only one Credit, one Add-on and one Boost per posting, and a product with none remaining cannot be used.
• JobsGoPublic: Sector, Working Pattern, Vacancy Duration and Occupational Group are all required. If they do not load, ask a System Admin to test the JobsGoPublic connection in Settings.
• Reed: choose an Advert Product. It is required. If the account has only one usable product it is chosen for you.
• LinkedIn Limited: optionally request a LinkedIn promotion. The choices come from the tags a System Admin saved on the LinkedIn Limited integration.
• CV-Library: an Enhancement (Branded, Featured or Premium Featured) is optional. It is requested from CV-Library after posting, and the posting shows the status of that request.
• TotalJobs: an advert template is optional. Without one, your TotalJobs account default is used.

What happens when you publish

Your careers page postings go live straight away, with the status Posted. External boards start at Pending and move through checks and delivery, and each posting appears on the job's Job Boards tab. A scheduled posting sits at Scheduled and goes live on its own at the posting date.

Some boards collect adverts in batches rather than one by one, so Adzuna and Find a Job (GOV.UK) postings can stay at Validated or Sent for a few hours. Select Check Status on the Job Boards tab to ask Recruit to re-check with the board straight away. Hover over "Awaiting board confirmation" to see the explanation, and the last check's result appears beside it.

The Expires column shows each posting's expiry, and a date within seven days is shown in orange. When a job's closing date passes, the job closes automatically within about an hour.

Adding boards to a live job

1. Open the job while its status is Published.
2. Select the ⋮ menu at the top right and choose Post to More Boards, or use the button of the same name on the Job Boards tab.
3. Tick boards, complete options, acknowledge any charge and check the Expiry date, as above.
4. Select Post (N boards). A confirmation reads "Additional boards added successfully."

Boards that already have a live or in-progress posting are not listed. A board whose earlier posting was unpublished, failed or expired is listed with a "Previously unpublished", "Previously failed" or "Previously expired" label. If nothing is left to add, the dialog reads "All available boards have already been configured for this job."

Rescheduling a posting

While a posting is still Scheduled you can move its posting date. Open the job, select ⋮ then Edit, and go to the Publishing step. Each posting is listed with its status. For a scheduled one, change the Posting date and select Reschedule. The new date must be in the future and before the posting's expiry. Once a posting is live its date is locked ("The posting date can only be changed while the posting is scheduled."). The Expiry date field on the same step applies to every channel, including your careers page. On a closed job this step is locked: "Reopen the job to change publishing settings."

Unpublishing and re-publishing

To take a job off one board while it stays live everywhere else:

1. Open the job's Job Boards tab.
2. On the posting's row, select the ⋯ button and then Unpublish. The button appears on Posted and Published rows.
3. In the Unpublish from Board dialog, select Confirm.

The row moves to Unpublished straight away and Recruit removes the advert from the board in the background. If that takes more than a minute the row shows "This is taking longer than expected. The board may be processing your request." The Company Careers Page cannot be unpublished on its own unless the job also has another live careers page.

To put it back, select Re-publish on the Unpublished row. The posting restarts with the job's own closing date as its expiry. For a paid board, use Post to More Boards instead, so you can tick the charge acknowledgement.

Pausing, closing and reopening

These change your postings as well as the job.

• Close Job takes down every posting, including your careers page. The postings become Unpublished.
• Pause asks how the job should behave. Block new applicants takes down all postings and hides the job from the careers page. Allow new applicants keeps the careers page posting and takes down the external boards.
• Unpause puts the careers page posting back if it was taken down. External boards are not restored, so add them again with Post to More Boards.
• Reopen on a closed job opens the Reopen Job dialog, where you choose boards and a new expiry date (it must be in the future), then select Reopen & Publish (N boards). If the job reopens but publishing does not work, a message says "Job reopened, but publishing failed". Check the job's details and publish again.

Bulk publishing from the Job Boards page

Use this to put many live jobs on boards in one go, for example after a migration.

1. Go to Job Boards in the main menu and select Bulk publish to boards.
2. The dialog counts your Published jobs. Tick the boards. The choices are Company Careers Page, Indeed, Adzuna and Find a Job (GOV.UK), and all four start ticked.
3. Optionally set an Expiry date. It applies to every job in the batch and overrides each job's own closing date. Leave it blank to use each job's closing date.
4. Select Check readiness. The result reads, for example, "12 of 15 jobs are ready to publish", with a line for each missing field such as "3 jobs missing Postcode".
5. Select Publish N ready jobs and confirm in the Publish to job boards? prompt.

Jobs that are not ready are skipped, and the result tells you how many: "Published 12 jobs, skipped 3". Fix the missing fields on those jobs and run it again. Boards where a job already has a live posting are left as they are.

The Job Boards page itself, titled Job Board Postings, lists every posting across all your jobs. You can search by job title and filter by status and board.

What candidates see

A job appears on your public careers page while it is Published (or Paused with Allow new applicants), has a live Company Careers Page posting and has not passed its closing date or the posting's expiry. Candidates open the job from the list and apply from there. Once the date passes, the job drops off the list.

The Internal Careers Page is a separate page for your own staff. A job appears there when it has a live Internal Careers Page posting, or for every published job if your organisation has set that page to show all roles. It is reached through its own private link rather than your public careers URL.

On an external board, the advert is built from the job's details, such as its title, description, location and salary, and it follows that board's own layout. If you edit a live job's details, Recruit sends the update to most external boards again. Boards that collect adverts in batches, such as Adzuna, pick up the change on their next scheduled run.