HOW TO SEARCH

Finding the right job can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. By developing a simple search strategy, you can use your time far more efficiently and increase your chances of finding the perfect job.

These days the vast majority of job advertising (and thus job searching) is done online and so what follows will assume that you are going to conduct your job search via the web.

Before we get into the process of job searches, it is useful to have a basic understanding of the different types of job websites out there. Below I have broken recruitment websites down into four categories based on the way in which they gather their job data. ​

1. Organisations advertising on their own website for their specific posts (e.g. John Lewis or GSK). These types of websites are great if you know you want to work for a specific company.

2. Industry or sector-specific websites (e.g. NHS jobs (jobs.NHS.uk) or academia (jobs.ac.uk)). These sites overcome the problem of having to search lots of company websites by bringing all the adverts from multiple companies in a given industry into one place. 

3. Recruitment firm websites. There are also recruitment companies that specialise in specific areas and often sell themselves as the top recruitment firm for industry X. As with the sector specific sites, don’t assume that everyone in a given industry will be using that recruitment firm.

4. Generic job websites that people pay to advertise on (e.g. Indeed.com, Monster.com, Reed or LinkedIn). These types of websites are the hypermarket of job sites. While some have a basic free option, most organisations pay to have their job advertised on the sites, and often pay an additional fee based on the number of times a job advert is clicked on, or the number of times people apply for the job via the site. They cover a broad range of industries, salary and experience requirements. As a result, the success or failure of your searching will depend on the filters you set up and keywords you search for.

​When using any job recruitment site, you need to find a balance between using lots of filters and inadvertently filtering out posts you might be interested in, and not using enough filters and having to wade through thousands of posts. Below are some basic principles for how to structure your job search.​

Have a look around and get a feel for where companies in your given industry advertise.Develop a multipronged approach using a number of the different types of sites to ensure that you have a good coverage of all the companies you are interested in. Spend some time playing on websites to understand how they filter and handle your data.

Once you’ve figured out the sites you like and how they function, take the time to set up and save your search criteria (filters and keywords). Set up email alerts so you don’t need to visit each of the sites multiple times every day in case a new job has been posted.