Some swear by them, some say they are a waste of time. Love them or loathe them, job boards is the natural first port of call for most job seekers. They are great for putting your finger on the job market pulse and to get an idea of what is out there.

Too many job boards:

The trouble with job boards is that you never know which one to use as new ones keep popping up on a daily basis. The barriers to entry in this industry are very low, as anyone with some technical knowledge can set up a free open-source powered job board and start posting positions tomorrow. This is part of the problem for the job seeker, as you will have to trawl through numerous sites every day and sometimes you have to sign up and upload a resume to apply as well.

Remember when the Internet was new and you were on AltaVista, WebCrawler, Yahoo and whatever new search engine that came out. Then one day you discovered Google and you never looked back…

Enter the job search engines:

The good news is that there are meta search job boards that aggregate job postings from other sites. Just like your typical search engines, these sites will compile jobs matching the skill and location that you enter. The results that come up will be pulled from all directions and will be with you in an instant. Traditional job boards such as Monster will charge their customers to post ads, the aggregators can’t do this as they are only linking to the original ad. Instead, they rely on advertising so you will have to put up with some Google Adsense next to your search results.

Benefits of job board aggregators:

The main reason for you to use an aggregator is that you will search through all jobs in one go. You will not find as many results from your search anywhere else. The comprehensive search will pull up results from job boards, newspaper’s job sections, company career pages, recruiter sites and more.

The other reason to use a job search engine is that you save lots of time. Instead of hopping through 10 job boards per day, just use your favourite aggregator and rest assured that you have all bases covered. The time you save can be put to good use for the other aspects of your job search.

Warning: lots of results and duplicates:

For obvious reasons, the aggregated sites will render long lists of results from your search terms. You will want to be as specific as possible when searching to narrow down the findings. Enter not only your skill but sub-skill, not only your town but actual zip code to begin with to keep results more specific.

The job search engines will also deliver a great deal of duplicate job postings. If a role is posted on three different sites (company, job board and recruiter), you are likely to get all three results from your search. Be aware of this and do not apply for the same job three times as it will not do you any favors.

Here are the best aggregated job boards in order of size:

Indeed: Started out back in 2004 and was the trailblazer for all job search engines and is still the largest. Indeed keeps expanding globally and is now available in 19 different country-specific versions. SimplyHired: Close runner-up to Indeed and definitely the great contender. It looks and feels just like Indeed but SimplyHired has more add-on applications that connects you to social media for easy sharing and research on the jobs you find. Available in 17 countries worldwide. CareerJet: Again a very similar application to Indeed, CareerJet claims to scan over 58,000 websites daily, and it’s available in over 50 countries and in 20 languages. LinkedIn Jobs: You may have heard about this professaional network, but did you realise it hosts a huge job board that scrapes career sites and job postings on the internet? Worth a click for sure. JobRobot: The biggest German-language aggregator which is very useful for central European job opportunities.

Final note

Try these job search engines and work out which one works best for you. Hopefully, you will save both time and effort by using these aggregator services. As always, remember to work all other fronts as well: networking, social media and recruiters in order to get your next job.

What is your favourite job board and why?

Related: What Job Boards are Most Useful for Applicants?