Image via CrunchBase
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been making a change in the way I search for positions. I haven’t liked the aggregator sites like Simply hired and Indeed because they deliver so many jobs that it is impossible to sift through them all.
Other job boards will go directly to company sites to get their listings. Aggregator sites also go to the company sites and to the job boards resulting in many duplications. Making the matter even worse, some of the job boards take many days to publish a job requisition. When they list it it will show up as new on the aggregator site and this can happen several times.
I have a list of about 10 companies that I have been going directly to their jobs website to look for jobs. one advantage of using the aggregator site is that it gives you one place to store possible job requisitions for later application submission. Over the last couple of weeks I have been paying attention to how accurately and timely the aggregator sites are at publishing job requisitions.
They seem to lag the actual company website by some amount of time which is dependent on how often they query the company. It appears that different companies get queried at different times. And it seems that simply hired and Indeed are up to date within a 24 hour period. I’m ok with being out of synch by only a day.
I have also found that I can limit the number of redundancies by limited the searches. In the advance search of Simply hired there is a filters section the looks like this:
With this I will only get job requisitions from the actual company.
Now I can go in a do a search with the company set to Amazon. And see all the job jobs that have come up for Amazon in the last seven days. This is great because Amazon is one of the companies that has a lousy user interface for finding jobs. It is much easier to do this using Simply Hired.
That is how I started on this path. I was noticing that certain companies took me a lot longer to search through their website sites to find what I was looking for. So I started comparing that companies listing with Simply Hired and then started replacing it. This allows me to see all the jobs that I company is hiring for, learn what is important for them and start to learn their language, while saving job requisitions from everywhere in just two places, simply hired and indeed.
Since the beginning of this search I have been using Simply Hired to do non-company directed searches. These rely on good search words to limited the number requisitions returned. Setting the filters as above again does a great job of limited the numbers by only showing the originating companies not all the redundancies. Since it is all on the aggregator, If I have already save a job requisition it will show up as already saved-thus reduces the time it takes to process. I’m working on removing the companies that I search directly on by doing an exclusion statement for each of these company names.
My normal “process improvement” search returns 550 job requisitions, excluding job boards reduces this to 128, excluding recruiters lowers it to 118, removing the direct search companies takes the number down to 99. And this is for the last 7 days. If I keep up with my searching I won’t have to look at but the last 24 hours or however long it has been since I performed this search.
Once I get a search the way I want it, I can then book mark the search in a special folder in my Firefox bookmarks. I have a folder call jobs and under this a file called searches. When I’m ready to do my searches, I open a new Firefox window, go to this searches folder and click on “open all tabs”. All the searches are executed at once, each in its own tab. I then go through each tab, saving any interesting looking requisitions.
Here is a look at the searches folder:
On the right side are my entries, each one representing a separate search. The duplication of searches are where I am still trying to understand the differences between Indeed and Simply Hired.
Making these changes has increased my ability to stay on top of the searching that I have wanted to do. And may allow me to expand my searches to do other companies directly and to develop other non-company specific searches.
I would be very interested in hearing any differences that you are using for your job searches, or any improvement suggestions that you might have.
Today’s quote:
Success is peace of mind which is the result of knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.
--John Wooden, Head Basketball Coach UCLA
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