When I first started in the career coaching field, back in 1993, finding job listings that matched your skills was an absolute piece of cake. There not only were there far fewer job niches and titles to worry about compared to today, but virtually any job that any employer wanted to fill was guaranteed to be found in a single place. The good old Sunday newspaper. It’s almost hard to believe, looking back, and younger generations may think we’re pulling their leg — but in the old days, the process of looking for published job openings might only take 10-15 minutes a week just as long as you had a copy of the Sunday paper in one hand and a highlighter pen in the other.
Fast forward to the Internet age, however, and things have gotten infinitely more complicated. Unlike the single source of the past, there are now estimated to be over 50,000 job boards in existence, and that’s only counting third-party sites like Monster.com and Indeed.com that are in the business of compiling/distributing job openings — not the millions of actual employer websites that contain career sections.
So if you’re a job hunter today, which sites should you be checking regularly in order to find opportunities for yourself? How can you make sure you don’t miss a promising opening in your field without spending every waking moment surfing the web?
To help answer that question, I spent a few hours recently conducting an exercise that I used to do more regularly, but haven’t quite gotten to in a while. I pulled up all of the largest and most well-known job boards and systemically searched them to see if they contained a handful of specific, recent openings that I’ve identified as being currently available at companies around town. Since most job sites today compile their listings by “scraping” jobs directly off employer websites, in other words, I wanted to see which of today’s job boards seemed to be the most comprehensive in this regard and which ones you could trust most to not overlook anything.
The results were not terribly surprising, at least to me, but for those new to the job hunting process they might shed some light on how the published job world works and steer you to the most effective approach to take. In a nutshell, after cross-referencing 25 currently available jobs (listed directly on employer websites) against the four top job boards today (Indeed.com, LinkedIn Jobs, Google’s Jobs page, and Ziprecruiter), here’s how they did:
#1: The Indeed.com database contained 21 out of 25 of the leads
#2: Google’s jobs page contained 20 out of the 25 leads
#3: LinkedIn’s Jobs page contained 18 out of 25 of the leads
#4: Ziprecruiter found only 15 out of 25 of the leads
Granted, this was a quick-and-dirty experiment and I’m sure one could pick nits with certain aspects of my methodology, but as a practical matter, I think it tells us what we need to know. If one is seeking to find the most job leads with a minimum of hassle, Indeed.com is still king of the heap. Not only does it have the deepest database, but it also has an extremely simple interface and fully supports the use of “boolean syntax” (a topic for a different day) so that users can create searches that match EXACTLY the parameters they’re seeking.
Right behind Indeed, however, you’ll find both Google and LinkedIn. Both sites also contained a preponderance of the openly available roles out there, but I personally find the LinkedIn interface far easier to work with than Google’s tool, so if forced to choose, I’d lean towards use of LinkedIn. Additionally, unlike Google, LinkedIn also contains proprietary leads that employers pay to advertise on the platform, so you’ll find some further leads in this regard that won’t be available anywhere else.
Lastly, there’s Ziprecruiter, trailing the pack in terms of the leads it was able to capture. And since there wasn’t a single case in my experiment where Ziprecruiter found a job listing that wasn’t also already turned up by the other sites, I don’t see any value in checking that site regularly and would ditch it entirely in terms of a destination.
So to sum all of this up for the average person who doesn’t want to waste innumerable hours each day turning over cyber-rocks in search of listings, if you’re only going to utilize one site for identifying and applying to published leads, Indeed.com is the way to go. If you want to be a little more thorough, add LinkedIn to the mix. And as for Google and Ziprecruiter? Or pretty much any other job website I’ve come across over the years? To me, searching these other sites just doesn’t seem to add much in the overall scheme of things. Sure, if you’re a purist, you could check them periodically — but I actually think such time would be better spent following the actual career pages of specific companies that interest you since again, as my results show, about 15-20% of jobs can only be found on an employer’s own website and not anywhere else. Plus, in this scenario, you’ll know they’re still viable jobs and not “zombie” leads that have already expired or weren’t legitimate in the first place.
Hope you find some of these observations useful and if you have any questions or relevant insights to share from your own experience with these tools, please don’t hesitate to add a comment!
