It might not seem like it at first glance, but truly, there are more resources to find jobs than you could ever take advantage of. In fact, despite having been in the career business for more than ten years, I discover new sources of jobs on a daily basis. And this multitude of sources is excellent news for you. This one fact may very well change the way you think about your job search forever. The question of where to find a job will no longer be one that you ask yourself.
Major Sources for Job Postings
You’ve probably used many of these sources, but I’m willing to bet you haven’t tried them all. You can find jobs on…
- employer websites
- job listing sites
- recruiter sites
- public interest sites
- nonprofit sites
- newspaper sites
- association sites
- government sites
- state career delivery sites
—and that’s just what you find online.
You can also discover job listings…
- in newspapers
- through recruiters
- through university career offices
- through informal networking
And that’s not all. You can also find jobs that don’t even exist (because employers will create them for you), which is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting ways to find a job.
So how prevalent are these sources?
You Can Find Jobs Employer Websites
Well, you can find roughly 50,000 employer websites that are very good, meaning they typically have multiple job opportunities and are updated regularly. Click here to read my related article about how to find jobs on employer websites.
Here’s a list of the job sites of the Fortune 1000:
Fortune 1000 Employers and their Job Sites
You Can Find Jobs on Commercial Job Sites
There are more than 15,000 job sites. These are commercial job sites that advertise and come up in search engines. Employers often pay to post jobs on these sites such as, Monster.com, Hound.com, CareerBuilder.com, EmploymentCrossing.com, Granted.com and many others.
There are geographic specific and profession specific sites for different types of professions. For example, our company runs more than two hundred websites catering to various professions and geographic locations:
Our company also has recently launched Granted.com. This site is designed to take your job search to the next level. More than a year in the making, it gives job seekers free access to thousands of jobs from as many websites and companies. Newspapers, employer websites, job boards, and other sources are included in Gig‘s database.
The site covers all major job industries and allows you to upload your resume or resumes and apply to many employers directly, simplifying the process of your job search.
Below are some pictures of Granted.com‘s home page along with a few other pages you will see on the site.
Gig categorizes jobs by industry and by location.
Gig lets you upload your resume or resumes, import your profile from LinkedIn, or even create your own resume to submit to employers.
In addition to our websites (above) there are literally tens of thousands more job sites.
You Can Find Jobs Advertised in Newspapers
The number of newspaper websites is difficult to pin down because there are so many small newspapers all around the country and the world that publish job listings. The number is really more than 10,000 but only about 5,000 have robust systems in place that are updated regularly.
Here is a list of national newspapers you can check for job openings:
Alittihadi [In Arabic]
Brief Synopsis (National & International)
China On TV (China) [In English]
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Financial Times (By Subscription Only)
Fresh Daily News (National)
Hurriyet USA [In Turkish]
International Herald Tribune (International)
Media Today USA [In English & Urdu]
Nordamerikanische Wochenpost [In German]
Petroleum News (By Subscription)
U.S. Business Journal (Subscription Only)
USA Today (Arlington, Virginia)
Village Connector Community News
Voice of America Urdu [In Urdu]
WE Port (National)
Zimbabwe International News (Canada & Zimbabwe) [In English]
Here is a list of newspapers (by State):
Directory of United States Newspapers
You Can Find Jobs Through Recruiters
More than 10,000 recruiters across the country maintain good, robust websites that continually post new available jobs. Click here to read my article about how to use recruiters to find jobs.
Here is a comprehensive list of recruiters:
You Can Find Jobs on Association Websites
Association websites generally have long lists of pinpointed job postings and are usually well maintained.
Here is a comprehensive list of associations:
You Can Find Jobs on Local Chambers of Commerce Websites
In addition, Chambers of Commerce are an excellent source of jobs. Here is a comprehensive list of Chambers of Commerce you can check for jobs in your area:
Directory of Chambers of Commerce
In terms of public interest websites with job listings, there are again more than 10,000.
You Can Find Jobs With Public Interest Organizations
Public interest organizations are another big source of job listings and also number around 10,000.
Directory of Public Interest Organizations
You Can Find Jobs With The Government
The number of government websites out there is way above 10,000 and is absolutely astonishing. Click here to read my article about government websites. Why are there so many? Because this encompasses not only federal government websites, but also the different agencies within the federal government that often have their own websites. Then you have states, counties, cities, and even areas or divisions within cities, with their own websites.
For instance, each city’s police department may have its own website. Regarding state career delivery websites, most states in this country maintain websites that contain lots and lots of state jobs. The site may also be associated with the unemployment office and can be a very good source of jobs, one that a lot of people don’t think about when they’re looking for a new position.
You Can Find Jobs With Colleges and Universities (and Other Educational Organizations)
In terms of college and university websites, conservatively we’re talking about 2,500. That number includes only the robust ones that are continually updated with new college and university jobs. Click here to read my related article about finding teacher and education jobs.
Here are some job sites that can help you with your search:
Directory of United States Colleges and Universities
There are likely tons of others sources you have not considered as well:
You Can Find Jobs Through Informal Networks
Informal networks are those people who know about a job with their current employer and may have inside knowledge of unadvertised positions. That number is huge, possibly in the millions. Click here to read my related article about finding jobs through informal networks.
Current employees can be a good source of recruiting and sell the company or organization to friends, so informal networks are a very good source of jobs. Employers end up hiring people for jobs before the position is even advertised anywhere because of the informal network.
You Can Find “Jobs That Do Not Yet Exist”
Then there are jobs that don’t even exist yet. I’ve estimated that there are 10 million sources of those. Pretty much every employer out there is willing to hire the right person if he or she comes along at the right time. In my opinion, this is probably the biggest source of jobs out there. If you can make a business case to an employer for why you should be hired and they believe that you can increase their bottom line, then that employer will likely hire you. Click here to read my related article about finding jobs where there are no openings.
When you start looking at all these various sources of jobs, one of the most important questions to ask yourself is, “How many people are applying to each of the jobs?” The reason it’s important to ask yourself this question is that if there are fewer applicants to a job, you’re more likely to be hired. With less competition, you can show off your most compelling gifts and make yourself stand out.
Obviously, nobody out there can go to 10,000 employer websites, 10,000 separate job sites, or 10,000 recruiter sites looking for a job. You need to be very selective with your time, but you need to also understand that within each of these different categories, the places that receive the fewest applications are typically the best places to get a job. If you’re unemployed, looking for a new position, or are having a difficult time finding a job that matches what you want to do, your best odds are going to be with a company that is not receiving a lot of applications.
Typically, the jobs on employer sites are unadvertised and poorly promoted. That might make you think they are getting fewer applications, but in the case of larger employers, oftentimes they are going to receive many more applicants. For example, take a big employer, like Microsoft or Google. Everybody has heard of them. If you’re living in a town where there’s a giant Ford factory or huge executive offices with thousands of people, you’re likely to go to that employer looking for a job, whether they have posted it on a job site or not. That means that with a large employer, there is likely to be lots of competition, whereas a smaller employer is likely to receive fewer applicants for each position. The reason is simple: people are more familiar with the larger employers and less familiar with the smaller ones. When they need a job, they automatically think of the largest employer in town.
Yet, a lot of times, smaller employers are really the best places to work for, especially if they’re growing. With a smaller employer, if you pick the right one, you can have a lot of potential there as the company grows, and that’s very important.
You may ask yourself, “How many people will I be competing with?” If you’re looking at something in one of the major cities, you’ll be competing with literally thousands of people for a single job. It’s not uncommon for an employer that posts on a big website to receive thousands of applications. That is definitely true if we’re talking about positions posted on job sites. Employers pay a lot of money for those postings because they’re expected to deliver a lot of applicants. Employer sites, by contrast, are always 100 percent free for an employer to post on. Because of this, an employer will typically post all of its jobs on its website. In those cases, as I’ve mentioned, it all depends on the size and prestige of the company.
Now that we’ve gone through the entire list of places where jobs are advertised, I want to give you some indication of costs in terms of how all these sites work. Meaning, who or what supports these sites and how do they work? It’s important to understand the money factor because money really does have a lot to do with what is happening to the jobs you’re interested in.
Employer sites, as I told you earlier, are free for employers to post on, so they will post all of their jobs on their own sites. Nonprofit, private sector, and government jobs are for the most part also free to post on. Even when they appear on a job site, the fee is often waived. Association websites, newspaper websites, and job sites will typically charge employers to post, which means fewer jobs appear on those sites. College and university sites tend to fall in the middle: some charge a fee and others don’t.
Recruiter sites are a different story. Recruiters typically promote jobs for free for the employer but charge a fee of 15 to 40 percent of your annual salary. That’s called a contingency search. Employers expect very high-quality applicants as a result. To some extent, that fee may mean using recruiters will reduce the odds of some candidates getting jobs. Imagine, for example, someone gets a job making $200,000 a year, and the employer has to pay a fee of 25 percent to that person’s recruiter—that’s a big fee. That’s $50,000.
Side by side, if there wasn’t a fee involved, that may be somewhat of a calculation in the decision to hire someone. For the most desirable applicants who really stand out, it probably doesn’t matter, but you have to understand that when you come through a recruiter, there’s a fee involved.
There is one other type of search that recruiters do that is called a retain search. This is the most common type of search. A retained search can be described as this: if General Electric decides they don’t want to hire people internally, they may decide to retain a headhunter to work on the search exclusively for them. Because the headhunter has to drop everything to do this, he or she will typically charge the employer a “flat fee” and then a “success fee” if someone is hired. The employer will also generally work with the headhunter exclusively to fill the position. This type of search is typically only used for extremely qualified applicants.
With a contingency fee recruiter, fees will sometimes make it harder for you to get hired, and here’s why: If a fee is being charged by a recruiter to hire you, that means it’s going to be a little bit harder for you to get hired should two applicants be compared side by side that are equal, and you have a fee attached while the other one does not. For the most qualified attorneys, executives, and others, the fee does not matter to hiring organizations. However, it makes a big difference for small organizations.
Fees are something you should always keep in the back of your mind because it’s telling you whether or not you’re getting a full understanding of everything going on in the market at one time. You really need to understand everything that’s going on with your job search, and that includes whether or not a fee is affecting your chances of getting hired.
Be concerned about privacy in your job search. Depending on where you’re applying, your privacy may be at risk. This is particularly true when you are conducting an online search and posting your résumé to various sites. You may ask yourself, “Why should I care if my résumé is online?” Although I firmly believe it’s in your best interest to have your résumé online because it’s out there marketing for you, you need to be aware of the risks.
When a job is on an employer’s site, you’re most often applying directly to an employer and the job is not going through any sort of middleman. The result of this is that you don’t really have to worry about your application getting back to your current employer, if you have one, or the employer doing anything improper with your application, like stealing your Social Security number. You don’t have to worry about all those concerns on an employer site.
In contrast, on a job site, privacy is a concern.
You’ve probably heard stories about job sites breaching their clients’ data or résumés getting out. Résumé posting can be dangerous. There have been incidents of identity theft and that sort of thing happening when your résumé is intercepted. When you send your résumé to a job site, you really don’t know everything that’s going to happen to it. I’ve even heard stories about recruiters going onto websites and submitting people for jobs, and then if the person gets the job interview, calling up that person, and trying to get them interested in doing an interview. This is a clear breach of your privacy. Also note that job sites and newspaper sites typically do contain a good proportion of recruiter jobs. That means you may not be applying directly to the employer but to a recruiter—a middleman who may not be as interested in your privacy. I do not recommend avoiding these sources for jobs altogether, but you do need to know who is handling your personal information at all times.
In addition to the risk of someone selling your résumé, there’s the potential of having your current employer find your résumé online. I’ve known people who have lost jobs when their employer found out that they were looking for a new job. If you’re in a good job and your employer finds out that you’re searching for a new position, even if you don’t get let go because of it, it could hurt your advancement potential. It’s generally a good idea to be as careful as possible when you’re looking for a job, to protect your confidentiality.
I’ll tell you an interesting story. It’s similar to the results you can have on job sites but it has to do with income opportunity jobs. This is another instance of people not applying to the jobs that they think they are.
Several years ago, when I was about eighteen or nineteen, I saw an advertisement in the newspaper for a janitor job. The advertisement said that the job paid some ridiculous amount of money compared to what a janitor job would typically pay back then. I was intrigued by the ad, so I called them. They told me to come on down and fill out an application. When I got there, I found a large line of people waiting to fill out an application for being a janitor. I realized very quickly that the odds of getting this janitor job were going to be very slim.
After some time, I was called into an office and told that I didn’t look like a janitor but instead I should consider being a door-to-door salesman selling imported knives from Asia and all sorts of cheap things. It turned out these people were using the high-paying job as a janitor to lure people into doing door-to-door sales all around the city. It’s important to understand that people may be using one job to generate leads for another. That happens with job sites and recruiter sites. They may be doing improper things with your application.
What’s important to understand is that privacy concerns really emerge when you start dealing with middlemen, mass market type employers, or companies who are recruiting people who are a little bit desperate for money, as with the janitor story.
Privacy is somewhat of a concern with college and university sites but it’s not really something you need to worry too much about most of the time.
Informal networks are very interesting in terms of your privacy concerns. I would go so far as to say there are severe privacy concerns. The concerns I’m talking about are not necessarily data theft, but too much information or bad information being passed along. I’ve seen issues with people applying to jobs through friends and family. In most cases, the information that’s passed along is good, but when you trust a friend to give an application to an employer, the friend may give the employer both positive and negative information about you because their reputation is on the line if they hire you. That may actually harm you more than if a friend was not involved in bringing you in.
In addition, your friends may tell the wrong people that you’re looking for a job. Once you start looking for a job through an informal network, the people that you deal with on a day-to-day basis might know about your job search. Typically, friends tell other friends each other’s secrets, even if they don’t want them to. That’s just the way it works. When you start using informal networks, be prepared for your employer to know lots and lots of information about you that you might not want them to know, both prior to you being hired, if you are hired, and after. I believe that it’s best not to have these nepotism policies. They typically can lead to a lot of issues with people knowing information they shouldn’t about their fellow employees. That’s just something to be aware of.
With finding jobs that do not even exist yet, privacy is somewhat of a concern but nothing to be too worried about. As an example, if you approach an employer saying you want to work for them, and that employer checks with your existing employer, it could potentially get back to them. It’s a little bit less likely for that to happen in most cases when that employer has a job posted than when it doesn’t. I’ve certainly never heard of this happening. When someone approaches an employer, most employers are very close to the vest and keep information confidential about who is looking for a job.
With association websites, privacy may be a concern, especially when the association has a lot of critter jobs and sales résumé access. Association websites typically sell résumé access. Larger newspapers sell résumé access. Résumé access is also sold at job sites.
You’ll post your résumé online and employers will come look at it, but also recruiters, thieves, and other people you may not want getting your information. When résumé access is sold, it can compromise your privacy. It can also be a good way to track down jobs, as long as you put down the information that you want there. If the site is selling résumé access, it’s something to be aware of, especially when it’s a large mega site. There are even consolidators out there who will look at your résumé or steal résumés off a big site, and consolidate them on an even bigger site.
These are the major categories of places where you can find jobs. I would strongly recommend you make sure you can track down each of the positions you’re interested in on all these locations in your job search. I’m so excited about all these different locations of jobs because of the way I see the market.
I see the market from a 30,000 foot altitude where all of the jobs have been dispersed to so many different locations with 100,000 plus employer sites, 10,000 plus job sites, 10,000 plus good recruiter sites, plus tens of thousands of other recruiters, 10,000 plus public interest websites, nonprofit sites, 10,000 or 15,000 plus really good newspaper sites, and a heck of a lot more than that in government websites, state delivery websites, colleges and university sites, informal networks, and more.
When you’re looking for a job, most people now may look on just a few websites. They may look on a job site, one of the big ones that they’re familiar with. This way of looking for a job is effective and it works, but imagine how much stronger your job search is going to be when you start looking at all of these other locations. Suddenly you’re open to a whole new world of opportunities.
To conduct your job search in the most effective way, you need to look at all of these sources of jobs. Once you start doing that, it will change everything for you because you’re going to have a much better sense of what’s available in the market.
When most people look at the market, they only look at a very small slice of the jobs. The more you look at jobs and the more you understand what’s available in the market, the better you’ll do.
This is the roadmap for job market information and the different places you can find open positions. Each of these job sources has strong positives and as well as drawbacks for your search. That’s why it’s important to canvass each of them. In future posts we’ll take each type of source in turn and uncover the best ways to use it.
About Harrison Barnes
Harrison Barnes is the Founder of BCG Attorney Search and a successful legal recruiter himself. Harrison is extremely committed to and passionate about the profession of legal placement. His firm BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys. BCG Attorney Search works with attorneys to dramatically improve their careers by leaving no stone unturned in a search and bringing out the very best in them. Harrison has placed the leaders of the nation’s top law firms, and countless associates who have gone on to lead the nation’s top law firms. There are very few firms Harrison has not made placements with. Harrison’s writings about attorney careers and placements attract millions of reads each year. He coaches and consults with law firms about how to dramatically improve their recruiting and retention efforts. His company LawCrossing has been ranked on the Inc. 500 twice. For more information, please visit Harrison Barnes’ bio.
About BCG Attorney Search
BCG Attorney Search matches attorneys and law firms with unparalleled expertise and drive that gets results. Known globally for its success in locating and placing attorneys in law firms of all sizes, BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys in law firms in thousands of different law firms around the country. Unlike other legal placement firms, BCG Attorney Search brings massive resources of over 150 employees to its placement efforts locating positions and opportunities that its competitors simply cannot. Every legal recruiter at BCG Attorney Search is a former successful attorney who attended a top law school, worked in top law firms and brought massive drive and commitment to their work. BCG Attorney Search legal recruiters take your legal career seriously and understand attorneys. For more information, please visit www.BCGSearch.com.