Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Do you have a favorite IT job board? Or an experience with a job board you’d like to share?
Clearly, Peter Weddle knows Internet job boards. He’s the editor of Guide to Employment Web Sites, which is now in its 8th edition and lists a whopping 350 Internet job boards.
350 job boards? Are there really that many? Yes, in fact there are some 9,000, he tells me, if you count the Web job boards of every newspaper, company and professional organization, along with niche job boards for obscure (but worthwhile) fields like vegan pastry chefs or New York dog walkers.
Okay, so given the endless sea of job boards, does Weddle have any insider’s tips for IT job seekers who want to get the most from tech job boards?
Weddle’s formula – which he recommends for job hunters in any industry – goes like this:
2GP + 3N
Translated into human-speak, it means that every job seeker should use 2 general purpose boards (like Monster and Hot Jobs) along with 3 niche sites: one for your specialty (Java, .NET, etc.), your industry (banking, healthcare, etc.), and your location.
“If you use that five site formula, you’re probably going to get the whole breadth and depth of the employment opportunities out there at any point in time,” he says. Otherwise, “There is no one site that really serves you.”
He also recommends that professionals make use of the automatic notification tools that most of the IT job boards offer, like the email you can set up to send you new listings. “Having the sites deliver a feed of jobs on a regular basis keeps you ‘in the play,’ if you will, of the job market.”
More importantly, the sites that offer these auto-notify emails are actually preferred by recruiters, he says. That’s because they cater to more passive job seekers – people who are already employed, who are (in the cruel logic of the job market) more attractive to recruiters. “Whether it’s fair or not, they consider that kind of person a higher caliber of talent.”
Top IT Job Boards
Everyone, of course, knows about the job board titans: CareerBuilder, Monster and Yahoo Hot Jobs, each of which posts IT jobs. Between them, these “big three” get tens of millions of visitors a month. Another highly trafficked option is Indeed. A search engine for jobs, Indeed aggregates the listings from (by its count) “thousands of Web sites.” In a recent visit, the site had added 1.1 million new jobs in the last 7 days. A search for “IT” and “New York” brought up 49,000 jobs.
Yet some tech employers complain that they get flooded with less qualified applicants from these general interest boards. Consequently, some companies list their new openings on more targeted IT job boards.
Any list of the top IT job boards includes the following:
Arguably the best known and most popular of the IT-centric job boards.
As the name says, targeted to the IT professional; offers a list of jobs by city on the home page.
Craigslist keeps on getting bigger and bigger; it recently claimed 10 billion pageviews a month. The site says it receives more than 2 million new job listings a month – only a portion are IT, of course, but the site is considered a very good one to scan for tech jobs.
Programming and design jobs, as well as a cornucopia of other IT jobs, from project manager to digital user analyst.
Lists jobs that pay $100k or more a year – many of which are IT jobs. (In fact, after management jobs, the largest category at the site is technology jobs.)
Founded in 1995, the site won a Weddle’s “User Choice” award in 2007. It’s owned by JobServe.com, which also owns ComputerWork.
Freelance tech work; the site is popular among programmers and tech support staff from developing countries.
Information Technology Crossing
One of the few boards that requires you to pay, which it claims makes it a more exclusive service. Charging users allows the site to not charge employers, which ITC says draws more total IT job ads.
In addition to an IT job board, Vault offers scads of insider information on companies and educational programs.
Many of these jobs are in fields like distribution or manufacturing, but the site has a dedicated “systems/ IT” section. (And of course companies that do logistic support are some of the biggest IT employers.)
Focuses on short term or contract work, which is a perennial source of many, many IT gigs.
RoadTechs: Computer and Telecom
Dedicated to short term (or “indefinite term”) work, RoadTechs touts itself “the interactive site for the traveling contractor.”
No doubt about it: plenty of uber-geeks visit this board, which lists every kind of IT job. The board is powered by
JobThread
Focused on tech jobs in UK and Europe, this board offers a wide array of both temp and full-time IT jobs. Cheers! (And good luck with your IT job hunt…)
