We all feel overwhelmed when hunting for a new job. Job board sites are important tools to identify the right opportunities, designed to connect job seekers with exciting opportunities. Whether you're a recent graduate or an experienced professional, learning how to employ job board websites effectively is important to landing your next role. This guide will tell you all you need to know to strategically leverage the right job boards for you.
Step 1 - Understand your needs and experience
Let's begin by thoroughly understanding how your past experiences and skills align with the available opportunities on the current job market. This step is crucial and you will see us coming back to what you worked out here, so don't skip this step. Take the time to reflect on your past roles, accomplishments, and the specific expertise you bring to the table. This self-assessment will help you identify the value you can offer to potential employers and will help you understand which employers to target which is crucial in choosing the right job board.
In addition to this alignment, it's important to clarify your own career goals. Ask yourself questions about what you want to achieve in your professional journey. Do you want to climb the career ladder, taking on more responsibilities? Do you want to gain more seniority in the position you are already in? Are you looking for a position that has better work-life balance? Or are you simply happy with the job you are doing and want to continue working the same way?
Eloovor can play a valuable role in this introspective process. When setting up your career profile, Eloovor can guide you through a set of thought-through questions aimed to help you better understand your own needs and experience - completely for free.
By delving into these aspects of your career, you will gain a clearer vision of your path forward, allowing you to navigate the job market with confidence and purpose. With a defined understanding of your goals and a strong sense of direction, you can approach potential employers with sincerity and focus, increasing your chances of finding a position that truly aligns with your professional aspirations.
Step 2 - Choose the right job board website
Now let's dig a bit deeper into the right job board website. The choices out there are almost endless. Here you can find a few of the most important ones. Try them out and see the positions they yield.
Here’s a categorized list of job board websites you may want to consider:
All Company Sizes
Startups
Large/Established Companies
Step 3 - Set up your smart filters
To significantly reduce the time you spend searching for jobs, consider to invest a bit of additional time setting up a strong routine that helps you shave off hours throughout your job search.
Focusing on the most important job search boards you identified above, begin by setting up filters that allow you to focus specifically on opportunities that match your needs and your market fit. Here the work you did in step 1 comes back into play. The filters that are available may differ from job board to job board, but take the time to go through the filters and match as many as possible to the needs and your targeted opportunities as possible, including:
Targeted job title
Targeted geographical area
Remote / Hybrid / Office
Company Size
Job Type
Anything else you identified in step 1 that you can find in the filters
In addition to these filters, set one more crucial filter: Posted within the last 24h.
This may look counter intuitive, after all you may want to apply to as many jobs as possible. But we at Eloovor are convinced that with the latest advancements in AI, the number games in job applications are over. Now more than ever, quality is much more important. You already did an important step in improving your application quality by identifying clear job targets. Some job openings can receive hundereds of applications within 24h. You need to make sure that your high quality application makes it to the top of the application pile.
Once the filters are set up, before diving into the results, take a moment to create a bookmark. This will ensure you don't have to set up the filters again next time. Do this now for all relevant job boards you identified earlier.
This brings us to the second part of the smart filters: the routine. Carve out some time that fits your schedule every day and work yourself through each of the filters you set up. With this, you will ensure to always find the most recent, most fitting opportunities for you. By doing this, you can create a proactive mindset that sets a productive tone for your entire day.
Step 4 - Apply to the right jobs only
With the filters set up right, you will already have cancelled out a lot of noise for your job search. But that does not mean that you should apply to every position you see. Applying to too many job postings doesn't just take a lot of time, but can also have a negative effect on your job search stamina, since the chances of many rejections or no-replies significantly increases this way. So, rather than investing a little time on many applications, make sure to apply to the right jobs and spend more time preparing for those.
So what should you look out for? Let's go back to step 1. The more time you invested in finding out what you want and how your past experience matches the current job market, the easier it will be for you to identify the right opportunities. You will want to pay special attention to any criteria or aspect that cannot be reflected in the filters. Here are a few areas to research on:
Experience - How well does your experience fit to the tasks required in the job descriptions?
Skills - Do you require the hard and soft skill set to execute the demanded job?
Career Goals - How well does the position set you up for the career path you envisioned for yourself?
Culture - How does the company culture fit to your personality?
Compensation - Is the offered overall compensation somewhat close to your expectations and to similar positions in the market?
Interests - How well does the opportunity fit with your overall interests?
Working these points out manually is a big time invest. You will need to not just read the job description attentively, but also do some further research on the company.
Just to be clear: We do not believe that you should only apply to positions that are a perfect match on every level. Instead, we suggest that you should invest the most time on the positions that seem like the best fit.
You may also wonder if it is not easier to just apply for that position and find all of these things out in the process. While this may feel like a shortcut, this approach may default you back to quantity over quality, taking a toll on the quality of the best fits and on your emotional balance in that process.
Instead of skipping that process, we invite you to use Eloovor instead, a tool focusing on helping job searchers like yourself spend more time on the right application. Eloovor gives you a true head start by analyzing your job fit to any given position, scraping thousands of pages on the internet for the latest company news, employee ratings, benefits, culture, and much more.
Once you know which opportunities to focus on, it is time to adapt your resume and cover letter to make sure that you make the right first impression (A task Eloovor can help you with, too!)
Step 5 - Leverage your network
After sending out your focused, high quality application, it's on the company to go through the applications and analyze from their side which they believe to be the best match for the position. The unfortunate truth is, that even though you have spent so much time preparing, the chances that there are better candidates than you are still given. So be prepared for rejections.
However, there are a few possibilities on how you can increase your chances:
Reach out to your network - Knowing someone in the company can help you give you the push up through the pile. We all are more likely to trust someone we know that suggests us a candidate than someone of whom we have only seen a resume.
Reach out to recruiters or hiring managers - If you have no network in the company you're targeting, you can also consider reaching out to recruiters or the hiring manager through LinkedIn or by email if you can find out who they are. They may not always answer you, but the pure fact that your name pops up multiple times in the process from multiple sides can bias them towards a more positive image of you. Just make sure to include a note if you're inviting them to join your network
Closing Thoughts
Job hunting can be an intense and challenging journey, but with the right strategies, tools, and mindset, you can transform it into a rewarding process of growth and self-discovery. By understanding your unique strengths and aligning them with the opportunities available, using the right job boards effectively, setting up smart routines, targeting the most suitable positions, and leveraging your network, you position yourself for success. Remember, quality always trumps quantity in job searching. Take the time to refine your applications and focus on opportunities that genuinely resonate with you. With determination and tools like Eloovor to streamline and enhance your efforts, you’ll be well on your way to landing a role that truly fits your aspirations and potential. Good luck—your next great opportunity awaits!