How to Find the Right Job Boards

Hi friend,

Today’s topic is about figuring out how to find jobs. There are hundreds— thousands— of job boards, and other places to find jobs online. How can you find the right jobs boards for you? Let’s figure out the answer by reverse engineering the problem and exploring how companies decide where to list jobs:

For the moment, let’s ignore the biggest job boards and job aggregators and talk about three types of job boards companies tend to use:

• Location-based job boards

  • Most companies with a physical presence target a city or region with their job posts. Look for local job postings in regional media, community spaces such as public libraries, local colleges and universities, or contact local politicians to see if they maintain or know of any local job resources. If you’re searching for a remote job, there are remote job boards and mailing lists as well!

• Role-specific job boards

  • There are specialized job boards for every industry and profession- accountants, software engineers, and plumbers! Narrowly focused job boards can help companies source better qualified candidates, and are a popular choice for hard-to-fill roles and companies that hire a lot of a particular type of role.

• Brand-aligned job boards

  • Sometimes a company will post on an industry-specific job board just because it is popular with competitors and they want to make sure job seekers don’t forget about them. Other times, a company has a value they believe is a selling point for job candidates, such as company culture (i.e. a job board for flexible work) or company mission (i.e. a job board for addressing climate change). 

Most people know about the big job boards like Indeed, Monster, ZipRecruiter, GlassDoor, and LinkedIn, but if you’re limiting your job search to the big job boards, you’re probably missing out on a lot of interesting opportunities. Make a list of the location(s), role(s), and brand values that you’re interested in, and start googling. When you find something, review recent postings to make sure it’s an active job board with positions that match your expectations, and then make a plan to check it on a regular basis.

Many job boards also offer the option of signing up email alerts, but based on my personal experience I wouldn’t recommend it. I just got a lot of spam for irrelevant jobs from most job boards. Instead, try checking job boards on a once a week rotation. Of course, job boards aren’t the only place to find jobs! I’ll share more about that in a future post.

Happy Monday!

Karissa