Sussex employers have more places to advertise a vacancy than ever, national job boards, social media, recruitment agencies, local platforms, and simply putting a notice in the window. Each has genuine strengths, and the right choice usually depends on the role you're hiring for, not a single "best" option that works for everything.
National job boards
Large national platforms offer scale, your advert reaches a huge number of people. For senior, specialist or remote-friendly roles where you genuinely need candidates from outside Sussex, this reach is valuable. The trade-off is that your advert sits alongside thousands of others, often with limited ability to filter for local relevance, and pricing tends to reflect that national scale rather than the size of a typical Sussex vacancy.
Recruitment agencies
Agencies do the legwork of sourcing and screening candidates for you, which is genuinely useful when you're short on time or hiring for a role you find hard to judge yourself. That convenience comes at a cost, agency fees are typically a percentage of the role's first-year salary, which can be a significant sum for a single hire, particularly for smaller businesses filling more routine positions.
Social media
Posting a vacancy on Facebook or Instagram costs nothing beyond your time, and can work well if you already have an engaged local following, a well-known café or shop, for example. The reach is unpredictable though, dependent entirely on how the post happens to perform, and there's no structured way for candidates to search specifically for jobs the way they would on a dedicated platform.
Local, Sussex-focused job platforms
A platform built specifically around Sussex, rather than the whole country, attracts a different kind of audience: people who have already decided they want to work locally, rather than a wider net that happens to include some local candidates. For most Sussex-based roles, retail, hospitality, care, trades, local administration, this tends to produce a smaller but considerably more relevant pool of applicants than a national board, often at a fraction of an agency's cost.
So which should you actually use?
For most local, in-person Sussex roles, a local platform alongside a well-written advert covers the vast majority of what you need, at low cost and reasonable speed. National boards make more sense for senior, specialist, or genuinely remote positions where local reach specifically isn't the priority. Agencies earn their fee when you're either extremely time-poor or hiring for something highly specialised where sourcing candidates yourself would take considerable effort.
Many Sussex employers find the most effective approach is combining a local platform with a clear, honest advert, rather than spreading the same generic listing across every channel at once and hoping volume makes up for relevance.