Top Job Boards: Your Ultimate Guide to a Dream Career

The best way for job seekers and potential employers to find each other is by leveraging the top online sites that support full-featured job seeker profiles.  Many job boards meet those requirements and this article outlines how to use job boards and which job boards (in our opinion) are the best.

What are Job Boards?

Technically, a job board is a site that lists job opportunities that are typically posted by employers or recruiters (almost like job ads). Employers usually pay a fee to have their jobs posted.  Most job boards will have an option to apply for the jobs posted directly with the employer. Job boards are, simply put, a repository of job opportunities. The functionality is similar to a resume, creating your profile and searching for job opportunities).

There are many different types of job boards.  Some are general job boards (lists opportunities across most job types, industries, and locations) and some are focused job boards (focuses on an industry, job type, or location).  An example of a focused job board is Engineering.com which focuses on career resources and job opportunities in engineering.  ZipRecruiter, Monster, Careerbuilder, and Glassdoor are examples of general job boards.

How to Determine the Best Job Boards for You

The first step in deciding which job boards are best for you is making a prioritized list of your job search goals.  Your prioritized list might look something like this:

1. Industry (e.g. financial services, retail, transportation, etc.).
2. Functional Role (e.g. accountant, engineer, sales clerk, etc.).
3. Location (City and State).
4. Company (specific companies where you would like to work).
5. Compensation and Benefits (e.g. salary, flexible work arrangements, health insurance, etc.).

Once you have your prioritized list, you can start to pick the 2-4 job boards that will best suit your needs.  We suggest 2-4 job boards because 1 is not enough and 5 might be too many.

While all of the best-known job boards (which we will tag as “general” job boards) will support all of the examples listed above, we recommend using niche job boards for item numbers 1 and 2 as these tend to also provide industry-specific and role-specific resources. We suggest one job for industry, one for functional roles, and two or so general job boards.

Finding Your Job Board

Functional Job Boards

Finding functional job boards is fairly straightforward. Job boards change often, but some of the more established sites have a large following and have developed the tools and opportunities to help you find your dream job.

• Ask coworkers, friends in the industry, or your local college career center for their suggestions on functional job boards.
• Searching for specific job boards works as well –  “engineering job boards“, “accounting job boards“, etc. will return a fair number of results.
• Many industry sites also list job boards.

The Best General Job Boards

Following is a list of a few of the best general job boards for your review.

• ZipRecruiter – ZipRecruiter is one of the best-known job boards and has one of the largest databases of job opportunities.  The site is free for job seekers and you can search for jobs based on job title, your resume is very easy and the best way to look for new opportunities that meet your criteria.
• Monster.com – Monster is one of the oldest online cover letters, saved searches, etc.) to help in your search.
• Glassdoor.com – Glassdoor is a great site for employer reviews (over 70 million company reviews). If you want to find out if a company is a good fit for you, the platform is a great place to start. Glassdoor has company reviews, ratings, and salary content and is a good resource for building your list of the companies where you might want to work.
• Indeed.com – Indeed.com has been around for a long time and helped create the popularity of  “job aggregator” sites. Indeed and Glassdoor are sister companies (both owned by Recruit Holdings). Indeed makes it easy to search and apply to many job opportunities very quickly.  You can set up email updates on opportunities as well.
• LinkedIn – LinkedIn is primarily known as a professional networking site and professional network interactions (some suggest that 85% of open key positions are filled through networking).  There is a bit more  You should probably request recommendations from your network. And now you are ready to start applying for jobs. Jobs are typically on the target company’s website which can be time-consuming. 

Summary

Having a mix of functional and general job boards will help you focus your job search on resources that match your job search goals. Although all of the sites listed above have robust job search features, we did find that overall, using ZipRecruiter is a more intuitive functional job board.  You can certainly try all of the sites to see which works best for you.

Job Search: Fundamentals of Effective Job Hunting, Resumes, and Interviews

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