This article evaluates the efficiency of three branch-and-bound heuristics for a job scheduling problem that minimizes the sum of absolute deviations of completion times from a common due date. To improve the performance of the branch-and-bound procedure, Algorithm SA is presented for the initial feasible schedule and three heuristics : breadth-first, depth-first and best-first search are investigated depending on the candidate selection procedure. For the three heuristics the CPU time, memory space, and the number of nodes generated are computed and tested with nine small examples (6 ${leq}$ n ${leq}$ 4). Medium sized random problems (10 ${leq}$ n ${leq}$ 30) are also generated and examined. The computational results are compared and discussed for the three heuristics.