Front of Mind:

Linkedin.com

It’s funny how far this has come from what it once was: At one point, this site was a novelty, where a few companies would post here, but mainly, it was if they had the wherewithall to do so. Now, from my perspective, it outpaces most other job boards. It offers a few interesting features:

• It ties back to your personal profile, allowing you seamless access to date on connections, employer/role details, and other data points (including how many applicants), making it convenient to do research on your search
• It has advanced filtering capabilities, allowing you to search based on keywords, title, location, aging, etc., and allows you to sort on those criteria as well.
• It has built in AI-capability to feed you recommendations on similar jobs to ones you are considering, allowing you to easily expand your search beyond the initial job
• It has a built-in job tracker, allowing you to keep track of your progress, instead of having to keep separate notes, as long as the posting is listed in LinkedIn

Downsides or Risks: Unfortunately, as convenient and easy to use as LinkedIn it does have some inherrent risks or downsides, including:

• “Familiarity breeds Contempt” – in other words, the more popular and useful something is, the more users find it and leverage it, therefore the higher the competition. LinkedIn is rife with substantial jobseekers vying for the same roles.
• There is a glut of fake postings and posters – meaning that for every solid, legitimate job posting, there is substantial traffic of fake listings, or scammers trying to access your information, or those that post, with no intent of actually hiring.

Google Job Search

I am actually a fan of this, as it allows you to leverage the capabilities of Google Search to manage lists of job opportunities to apply to. This is a a useful way to curate dynamic lists of job postings to apply to, and enables some pretty powerful capabilities for filtering, sorting, and refining what you see.

Glassdoor.com

I am reserving judgement on Glassdoor.com – not because I do not think the platform is useful, because I do feel it is. However, recently, it seems to have tied it’s offering to Indeed.com, which I will list below. I am more interested in seeing what each of these platforms has to offer, and at one time, this site offered it’s own search algorithm for it’s search engine.

Indeed.com

This site originally was very productive for me, but I have found in recent times that the results seem a little less robust than I remember them being. What I do like is it will remember your preferences once you enter them in, and then re-visit.

Honorable Mentions:

ZipRecruiter.com

ZipRecruiter.com has been around a little while, and touts itself as a differentiator from other sites, in that it offers algorithms and tools that work in the background to curate relevant hjobs for the jobseeker and pushes them to you to save you time from having to look. The search tool leaves something to be desired, and unless you know how to find it, will not just show up typing in the main URL. This same set of time / labor saving logic is also supposed to benefit hiring companies by leveraging matching algorithms to pair exceptional candidates with needed roles. Their marketing seems really compelling (in other words, the “force is strong with this one” from a marketing point of view), but what does that mean for real world results? Does it make for better hires? Faster? Better? Who knows?

Hiring.Cafe

Fairly new entry into the job search platform space. This site touts it’s AI-powered capabilities, and how it will disrupt the space already owned by LinkedIn and other larger players. On the surface, this site is not so intuitive. For me, it took a little time to figure out how to manipulate and personalize my search, which does not bode well for ease of use similar to ZipRecruiter above). When logging into a job search platform, I believe you should not have to do too much heavy lifting to find what you need, so I’m not crazy about this interface. Does it provide “better” results than other job boards like LinkedIn or Monster? We’ll see.

RemoteRocketship.com

Here is another novel entry to the job search mix. What I find most interesting are 2 things: 1) Heavy focus on remote job listings on a global basis (not just the domestic US). 2) It has a toggle allowing you to find roles otherwise not found on LinkedIn, which seems really useful. The one downside (so far), to unlock more powerful features, or to get any depth in your search, you need to subscribe, which will come with a price tag. Why should I pay to find a job? Is it really worth the results?