Top Job Search Websites: Find Your Next Opportunity

"Obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it."—Michael Jordan

I feel like the on-line story is not complete until we cover the job boards. The list is long and grows constantly.   You can find an article (produced by one of the job search sites) on the top 20 sites for 2024 here: https://www.upwork.com/resources/best-job-search-website

Names include:

·       Indeed: https://www.indeed.com/ 

·       Monster: https://www.monster.com/  

·       Glassdoor: https://www.glassdoor.com/index.htm  

·       Zip Recruiter: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/  

·       CareerBuilder: https://www.careerbuilder.com/ 

·       and many others.

This is the natural evolution from the newspaper ‘want ads’ that would be published daily.  Anyone born prior to the year 2000 might even wax nostalgic about holding the paper in your hand and having a pen or marker to circle the jobs of interest and/or tear them out of the paper. Rather than wait for the paper to be delivered now you can scan these sites and keep tabs on possible jobs with certain titles or with certain companies.

The job board sites are fairly inexpensive, and, as a result, are popular for posting positions.  These sites are more commonly used for hourly job postings and lower-level salaried positions, but companies will experiment with job postings of many levels here due to the low relative cost. These job postings will also typically be more brief and have the feel of a newspaper want ad of old. Sometimes brief is better.

You can conduct searches on these sites that will help ‘serve up’ opportunities that might be a fit. You can search by several different variables: location of job, how old is the posting, pay levels, speed of hiring, job title, companies, education requirements, etc.  These will help you quickly get a view on job postings that should be interesting to your search.

You can also set up alerts on these sites with defined job criteria to alert you when a potential job match comes up.  You can get a monthly, weekly, daily or immediate alert when the job is posted.  Your search criteria options will vary a bit by site, but they should include job title, location or remote, some idea of salary range, etc.

The innovation by Linked In, was to create a community of businesspeople first and then start to add in the job postings and search functionality.  Some of the Job Board sites are now starting to emulate this approach, but they start from quite a distance behind and there is a question about how many places you can keep your information posted and up to date.

The job boards are making some headway and allowing you to create your own profile, attach your resume and allow you to apply for many of the jobs with a simple click of the button. Of course, the easier it is to apply this invites more people to apply so your competition to be noticed may be more fierce.

An interesting twist on some of these sites are the company reviews and salary information. These are spots for people (typically past or current employees) to post information on their experiences and thoughts about the company.  Employees that are disgruntled are typically more motivated to take the time to post something so this naturally lends itself to be more negative.  However, the opportunity is there for positive comments, and it gives you some impression of a potential employer.  The salary information is a newer twist and makes management and old timers uncomfortable.  The transparency of pay for certain levels can be helpful, but people need to keep context on the job locations and sizes of various companies. Data can be good but needs to be kept in perspective.

These websites are important, and they have their place.  Depending on the type of job you are looking for they be more or less relevant to your search efforts.