Thursday, July 28, 2016

What's your favorite job searching site?

From the inbox, a reader wonders about how to improve his applicant pool: 
I'm a long time reader of your blog and I have a question that I hope maybe you or your readers can help to answer.  What websites do most people use to find jobs out of grad school? I did a postdoc and then was lucky enough to find a job straight through networking so I don't have much experience.... 
...I've tried LinkedIn, and we have gotten quite a few decent candidates, but I would love to find a way to increase the pipeline.  Any suggestions?
So there are my favorites, C&EN Jobs and Indeed. I suspect that Monster and Careerbuilder are quite a bit less valuable, but I dunno.

I also like the various regional sites that seem to be high-signal, low-noise, such as Seattle's WashingtonLifeScience site and Boston's MassBio careers board. When I get crazy, I'll look at the "science/biotech" section of Craigslist for various cities, but those are pretty low signal.

Readers, your thoughts? 

6 comments:

  1. Indeed seems to be the site of choice for a lot of people I know who browse often but the biggest players do not advertise on there. I think about the area I would like to move and find people I know in the area and try to network, or stalk people on Linkedin. I've only had one job though and it was through networking so who am I to say?

    Meanwhile, is there any good regional sites for the PDX/Oregon area? I'd like to be there but not much opportunity outside of Thermo and Nike it seems.

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  2. Biospace, Indeed, and Linkedin are all right. Networking is the still the best though, that's how I got 80% of my jobs. Start with your Master/PhD/postdoc advisor's network. Once you find a job, keep growing your network locally and outside of your town. Help other people find jobs, they may help you in return in the future...

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    1. Ahhh, Biospace, I forgot about that.

      Also, the site Organic Chemistry (http://www.organic-chemistry.org/jobs/) routinely has job postings.

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  3. Indeed is just a data aggregator, kind of like a google specific for jobs. Unless it has changed since I last looked you cant actually advertise there directly. It was by far my go to job search site, but that was because it included data from most of the job board sites, plus information directly from company sites, all in one place.

    Your person seems to want to know where to advertise, which would preclude Indeed (again, unless it has changed). Possible you could ask them to include your company careers page if it doesnt already, no idea if they do that but worth trying to contact them to try. But if you want to put your stuff on Indeed you jsut need to put it on Biospace and it will turn up anyway.

    For my purposes it pretty much pulled everything except Craigslist.

    Which brings another comment: Craigslist used to be a reasonable place to post when the market was way softer and you didn't want to be bombarded. Probably less effective now if it is hard to get good candidates.

    Final suggestions. 1) Add CJ to post for you - it's worked well for me (tx CJ!). 2) See if any of your current employees have been through someone like Lee HEcht Harrison (the companies your company hires to help you "transition"). They often have reasonable alumni networks and like job postings from alumni from current (and past) participants. I know LHH has such a thing 9from personal experience), not sure about the others.

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  4. Indeed and MassBio is what I used most when I was last out of work.

    That said I have had 4 jobs in my career. Three were from newspaper ads (yes it was awhile ago... )

    My current job I found because my previous manager saw the job posted on the MIT job board (she got her PhD there) and told me about it. I guess that counts as networking though she did not know anyone at the company.



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  5. Well maybe if they were offering more than $25/hr with no benefits on a 6 month contract they would get more applicants.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20