A 90-person industrial-software company in Lyon has just signed its first customers in Poland, Mexico and Malaysia. The CEO wants a sales engineer in each market by the end of the quarter, and the HR manager, who is a team of one, does what most people do first. She opens LinkedIn, buys three promoted posts and waits.
Two weeks later the Warsaw post has 140 applicants, many of them outside Poland and without the right to work there. The Monterrey post has eleven. The Kuala Lumpur post has a handful of strong profiles, and every one of them heard about the company from a friend on Jobstreet, where the company has never posted. Nobody did anything wrong. The company simply assumed the job market works the same way everywhere, and it doesn’t. Every country has its own national champion board, its own public employment service and its own niche channels, and that mix decides who ever sees your advert.
This directory is the reference page of the Platforms & Job Boards pillar in our Finding the Right Person hub. It maps 40 markets across four regions. For each one it names three things: the general job boards that carry most of the traffic, the public employment service every employer can use (and some must use), and the niche or local channels experienced recruiters in that country turn to when the big boards bring volume but not quality.
Use it before you spend money. Almost every market follows the same pattern: one or two global platforms, one dominant national board, a state service and a long tail of specialists. The names and the balance of power change at every border, though. An advert that works on StepStone in Düsseldorf will find you nobody in São Paulo, because StepStone isn’t a meaningful channel there. Catho, Vagas, Gupy and LinkedIn are. The tables give you the names, and the sections around them explain what matters in each region and how to build a shortlist.
Rankings move. Monster closed its continental European sites in July 2025, Glassdoor’s operations were folded into Indeed the same year, and SEEK’s Asian boards moved onto a single platform in 2024. Everything here reflects the landscape at the time of writing (November 2026). Check current pricing and traffic with each board before you sign anything.
- Every market has four layers: global platforms (LinkedIn, Indeed), a national champion board, a public employment service, and niche or community channels. Use at least two of them for any role you care about.
- Local champions still lead in much of Europe, Türkiye, India, Japan, Korea, China and Latin America. In those markets Pracuj.pl, Kariyer.net, Naukri, doda, Saramin, BOSS Zhipin, OCC, Catho and Computrabajo are core channels, not optional extras.
- Public employment services are free, and in some countries using them is compulsory. Singapore, Canada, Switzerland and Ireland tie state-portal advertising to work permits or vacancy-reporting duties.
- Nationalisation rules in the Gulf (Emiratisation, Saudi Nitaqat) and South Africa’s Employment Equity Act shape which channels you use and how you word the advert.
- Check that a board is still worth paying for. Ask for recent applicant numbers for a similar role and city, and confirm it still operates: several big names have closed or merged since 2024.
Every job market has four layers
Before the tables, a model. In each of the 40 markets below, the channels that carry job adverts fall into four layers, and each layer behaves differently.
Global platforms sit on top, LinkedIn and Indeed above all. They reach almost everywhere, you buy them self-serve, and their audience skews towards whoever already uses them. In most markets LinkedIn over-represents managers, graduates of the better-known universities and people at multinationals, while Indeed over-represents hourly and mid-level roles. National champions come next: StepStone in Germany, Pracuj.pl in Poland, Kariyer.net in Türkiye, Naukri in India, SEEK in Australia, doda and Rikunabi in Japan, BOSS Zhipin in China, OCC in Mexico. Where a national champion exists it usually carries more local candidates than any global platform, and candidates trust it because their friends found jobs there.
The third layer is the public employment service: France Travail, Germany’s Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Canada’s Job Bank, Singapore’s MyCareersFuture, Japan’s Hello Work. These portals are free and they reach unemployed and career-changing candidates that commercial boards often miss. In several countries, advertising on them is a legal step before you can hire a foreigner. The fourth layer is the niche and community tier: specialist boards, professional bodies, university portals, Telegram and WhatsApp channels, Hacker News threads. Volume there is low, but a far higher share of applicants fit the role. Our guide to niche job boards by profession covers that tier in depth.
The practical rule follows from the model. For any role you care about, use at least two layers and make one of them local. A global platform on its own gives you reach without local depth, and a niche board on its own rarely produces enough candidates to compare.
Europe: national champions still beat the global giants
Europe is the region where the global platforms are weakest compared with local champions. LinkedIn is strong for professional and management hiring across the continent, and Indeed has built real volume in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. In Poland, Switzerland, the Nordics, Romania and Türkiye, though, a national board still sets the price of attention. Language matters as much as the board: a German-language advert on StepStone and an English-language advert on LinkedIn reach two different groups of people, even in the same city.
What has changed since 2024
The biggest change is an exit. Monster’s continental European sites, including monster.fr, monster.de, monster.be and monster.lu, went dark on 30 July 2025. That followed the US parent CareerBuilder + Monster entering Chapter 11 earlier that summer with no buyer for its international business, as Luxembourg’s business paper Paperjam reported. If your agency or applicant tracking system still lists Monster as a European multiposting destination, remove it.
In Germany, XING has finished turning itself from a business social network into a jobs platform. Groups and events were switched off in 2023, and the service now centres on job search, with kununu employer reviews alongside it. It still deserves a line in a DACH media plan for mid-career German speakers, but it is no longer the networking channel it was a decade ago. France’s public service was renamed France Travail on 1 January 2024, replacing Pôle emploi. Adverts placed there are free and are syndicated widely, and the service is a sensible first stop for operational and regional roles.
The other change is legal rather than commercial. The EU Pay Transparency Directive had to be transposed into national law by 7 June 2026, and its core duty is to tell applicants the starting pay or pay range before the interview. That is pushing boards to make salary fields more prominent. Poland’s tech boards such as Just Join IT and No Fluff Jobs have published salary ranges as standard for years, so they make a useful benchmark. Our explainer on what the EU Pay Transparency Directive means now the deadline has passed and the question set for setting the pay band before you post cover what goes in the advert.
Two European countries attach duties to their public portals. Switzerland’s job-reporting obligation, and Ireland’s labour market needs test for employment permits, both appear in the mandatory-portals table further down. For deeper country detail, read our playbooks for the UK, Germany, France, Poland and Türkiye.
The Americas: Indeed’s home turf and Latin America’s classified-ad heritage
The United States is Indeed’s home market and the place where pay-per-click job advertising took hold first. The American market therefore looks different from Europe: fewer national champions, more aggregation, and spending concentrated on a handful of platforms. Latin America is the opposite. It grew out of classified advertising, regional networks such as Computrabajo and Bumeran operate across many countries, and national leaders like OCC Mundial in Mexico or Catho and Vagas in Brazil still carry weight.
In the US the contest is between Indeed, LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter. Glassdoor stopped being a separate posting decision in 2025, when its parent Recruit Holdings folded Glassdoor’s operations into Indeed. Jobs now flow from Indeed to Glassdoor, and the Glassdoor brand survives mainly as the review and salary site candidates check before they apply. Monster and CareerBuilder live on as brands under Bold, which bought the job-board business out of bankruptcy for $28.4 million in July 2025, but neither is the force it once was. State job banks and the Department of Labor’s American Job Centers cost nothing and are underused by private employers. More and more states, including California, Colorado, Washington, New York and Illinois, require pay ranges in job adverts, so check the state rules (and our guide to California’s good-faith pay-range standard) before you post.
Canada adds a government layer most employers only meet when they need a foreign worker. To support a Labour Market Impact Assessment, the role must normally be advertised on Job Bank and through at least two other methods, for four consecutive weeks within the three months before the application. Several provinces now require pay ranges in public job postings, British Columbia since 2023 and Ontario since 1 January 2026 among them. In Québec, French-language adverts on Jobillico or Jobboom reach people that an English-only LinkedIn post never will.
In Latin America two names travel. Computrabajo is present in most Spanish-speaking markets, and Bumeran covers several more, while Chile’s Laborum and Argentina’s ZonaJobs are strong national brands. Brazil is its own world. Catho and Vagas.com are the long-standing commercial boards, and Gupy, an applicant tracking system with a public job portal attached, has become where many mid-sized Brazilian employers publish roles. Across the region, tech hiring increasingly runs through Get on Board, and frontline hiring through WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages that no directory can fully map. Our playbooks for the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia go market by market.
Middle East and Africa: regional hubs, quota rules and mobile-first boards
The Gulf works as one regional labour market with national rules on top. Bayt, Naukrigulf and GulfTalent advertise across the GCC, LinkedIn is the default for professional roles, and Indeed has grown in volume. But who you may hire, and how you must report it, is set country by country. In the UAE, Emiratisation targets apply to private companies with 50 or more employees, and the federal NAFIS platform exists to connect them with Emirati candidates. Saudi Arabia’s Nitaqat programme grades companies by the share of Saudi nationals they employ, and HRDF’s employment platforms and the Qiwa labour portal are part of every Saudi hiring workflow. If you are bringing in foreign staff as well, our employer guides to hiring expats in the UAE and hiring expats in Saudi Arabia cover the permit side.
North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa are mobile-first markets. In Egypt, Wuzzuf is the professional default and its sister site Forasna serves blue-collar and vocational roles. In Morocco, ReKrute and Emploi.ma lead for white-collar roles, with ANAPEC as the state service, and French-language adverts remain the norm for corporate jobs. Nigeria’s Jobberman and Kenya’s BrighterMonday are the best-known commercial boards in their markets. Even so, expect a large share of applications to arrive through WhatsApp, Telegram and LinkedIn messages rather than formal portals, so give candidates a short, mobile-friendly way to apply. Nairobi hosts a large number of international organisations, and for development roles there ReliefWeb and the UN’s own career sites are where the real competition happens.
South Africa has the continent’s most developed commercial board market, with PNet (part of the Stepstone Group), Careers24 and CareerJunction, and the most demanding rules on advert content. Designated employers under the Employment Equity Act must align recruitment with their employment equity plans, and adverts often state equity preferences openly. The SAYouth platform is the main channel for first-time jobseekers. Read our playbooks for the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa for the detail.
Asia-Pacific: super-apps, graduate cycles and the SEEK network
Asia-Pacific has the most fragmented landscape and the strongest local champions. SEEK dominates Australia and New Zealand. In South-East Asia, SEEK’s Jobstreet (Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia) and Jobsdb (Hong Kong, Thailand) moved onto a single SEEK platform in February 2024, a network SEEK says reaches more than 40 million candidates across eight markets. In Japan, Korea and China, LinkedIn is a minor channel and domestic platforms set the rules.
Japan has three separate hiring markets. New graduates are recruited in a once-a-year cycle through Rikunabi and Mynavi. Mid-career professionals use doda, Rikunabi NEXT and Mynavi Tenshoku, and more and more of them are reached through scout-based services such as BizReach. Bilingual candidates can be found through Daijob, CareerCross and LinkedIn. Hello Work, the public employment service, is free and widely used for local and small-business roles. Miss the graduate calendar and you wait a year, which is why our Japan playbook starts with timing rather than boards.
In China, BOSS Zhipin’s chat-first model, where candidates message the hiring manager directly, has changed what candidates expect in terms of speed. Zhaopin and 51job remain broad generalists, Liepin is the mid-to-senior and headhunter channel, and Maimai is the professional network. LinkedIn withdrew its China jobs app, InCareer, in 2023, so don’t plan a China search around it. Korea’s Saramin and JobKorea are the generalists, Wanted dominates startup and tech hiring, and Albamon covers part-time work. India’s Naukri remains the default for white-collar hiring, with Apna and WorkIndia for frontline roles and iimjobs, hirist and Instahyre for management and tech.
Singapore builds its public portal into the work-pass process. Under the Fair Consideration Framework, most Employment Pass applications must be preceded by an advert on MyCareersFuture for at least 14 days. Australia’s SEEK has no free tier and prices each advert individually, while Workforce Australia, the government board, is free. The country playbooks for India, Singapore, the Philippines and Australia add salary norms, notice periods and agency practice.
Where the state’s job portal is not optional
Most employers treat public employment services as a free extra. In a handful of markets they are a compliance step, and skipping them can sink a work-permit application or breach a reporting duty. The table summarises the cases you are most likely to meet. Each one is a simplification of detailed rules, so read it as a prompt to check rather than as the rule itself.
There is a pattern behind the table. Countries that admit skilled foreigners through employer sponsorship want proof that you looked locally first, and the public portal is the cheapest proof to audit. If you expect to sponsor even one visa in the next year, post every comparable role on the state portal from the start and keep dated evidence. Building that habit later costs you a month. Where you have no local entity at all, the question changes, and our guide to hiring in a country where you have no entity explains how employer-of-record and contractor routes affect who does the advertising.
Building a shortlist for a market you don’t know
The tables give you candidates for a shortlist; they don’t pick it for you. Pick by role first and country second. A senior finance hire in Dubai, a warehouse supervisor in Dubai and a React developer in Dubai need three different channel mixes, even though they share a city. Our decision matrix for which hiring channel suits which role sets out the logic, and the question set below turns it into a decision for a specific country.
Start with the population you want to reach, estimate where it already spends time, and only then compare prices. Most wasted job-advertising money comes from doing those steps in reverse: buying the board you know, then hoping the candidates are there. Price comparisons come later, and our breakdown of what it costs to post a job on each platform covers them.
Checking a board before you pay
Directory tables age, and board sales pitches are written to close a deal. Before committing more than a trial budget, ask four things. First, ask for anonymised response data: how many applications did comparable roles in the same city receive in the last 90 days, and what share were from people with the right to work there? A board that can’t or won’t answer is telling you something. Second, run a single test advert before you sign an annual package, even if the per-advert price is higher. Third, check the board’s data-protection position. Under GDPR in Europe, KVKK in Türkiye, China’s PIPL and India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, you are responsible for how candidate data is collected and stored, including on third-party boards.
Fourth, check that the board is what it appears to be. Every market has look-alike sites that scrape adverts from real boards and then sell ‘premium placement’ to employers or charge candidates fees. A legitimate board shows a company registration, a physical address and a working employer support line. Never pay a board that also charges candidates to apply.
Finally, connect the board decision to the rest of the hiring plan. A board only delivers applicants. Whether those applicants become a hire depends on the advert, the screening and the speed of your process, which our guides to writing job descriptions that work and the job ad legal check by country cover.
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