The Tech Job Board Guide
How to dodge the spam and efficiently find the roles you're looking for.
This guide is for folks who need to treat their job search like a full time job. If you’re passively applying for jobs, just make a Welcome To The Jungle (formerly Otta.com) profile and call it a day. For everyone else, buckle up!
LinkedIn - Largest (Inefficient) Selection
I have a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn. On one hand, I wouldn’t have a technical career without them. On the other hand, they are a monopoly and take full advantage of it. They often neglect important features, or even make them worse for the sake of revenue generation. That said, if you want to reference just one source to see the majority of the jobs on the market, LinkedIn is by far your best choice.
What LinkedIn Gets Right
LinkedIn makes other “general purpose” boards like Indeed, CareerBuilder, and Monster redundant. Aside from being the largest job aggregator - LinkedIn should also be the first stop on your journey if you’re researching potential employers. LinkedIn has strict vetting procedures for jobs on their platform - you can be fairly certain that any opening you come across is from a real company. Whether the job actually exists is another story…
No Scams, Lots Of Spam
LinkedIn is structured to keep you scrolling/clicking for as long as possible. As a result, no matter how well you structure your search keywords, you will never get truly relevant results. You will need to rephrase your search a dozen times and dig through multiple pages to find what you’re looking for. LinkedIn will aggregate jobs whether companies pay them or not, but the sponsored jobs get priority when you’re browsing. This leads to irrelevant sponsored jobs being pushed to the top of search your results, and it also leads to undesirable companies spamming sponsored jobs they have no intention of hiring for. They could be doing this as a form of advertisement, to show investors they’re “growing”, and worst case, it’s a way to farm sensitive data from job applicants for marketing purposes.
Startup-Focused Job Boards
Startup jobs often aren’t posted on LinkedIn or any other mainstream board for a variety of reasons. Most often, startups too busy building a product to invest time and resources into creating formal job descriptions and adopting an applicant tracking system. They have just enough bandwidth to throw together a rough paragraph of what to expect, some requirements, and a salary range. They’ll run it past their friends first, and if no one has a solid referral, they end up on the following boards.
Y Combinator’s “Work At A Startup”
There are many startup accelerators and venture capital firms out there at this point, but none have a focus on connecting talent to startup founders at scale quite like Y Combinator’s “Work At A Startup” board. Another huge player in the startup space is Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, but they don’t have an internal job board, let alone a job board that aggregates jobs across their portfolio of companies like YC.
What makes YC’s board unique is there often isn’t a formal application process, and you get connected directly to founders. You create a profile on their website with your job history and interests, and that unlocks access to their board. Often times when you click the “apply now” button it simply prompts you to write a note to the founder listed, and they’ll get that note with your profile attached when you apply. Sometimes there will be a unique prompt to respond to, or just a general “Why are you the perfect fit for us?” prompt.
Wellfound, Formerly AngelList
Wellfound is the O.G. startup job board. A few years ago it was a bit of a mess, with lots of sketchy postings from unverified sources. If you haven’t visited in a while, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Their new UI is fantastic and it looks like they are actively vetting startups now.
You may have noticed that both Wellfound and YC’s job boards highlight equity in their postings. If you’re just glancing at the salary ranges, you’re doing yourself an enormous disservice. Equity is huge in the startup world - I go in-depth on the subject here if you’re interested.
What About Google?
Though Google does not advertise a job board product, if you type in a search that it recognizes as job search related, it will actually whip up a board-like interface for you to filter through. For example, here’s what comes up when I search “remote elixir engineer jobs in the US”.
I Do Not Recommend Using Google
Looks great right?! A full-featured job board with vast filtering abilities. You can actually find some unique roles here. For example, I find that Google often lists non-profit roles that aren’t listed on any traditional boards. You can also set up very, very, specific email alerts for your job search.
Unfortunately, Google’s job search functionalities are completely unmoderated. This has made it a haven for scammers. At the time of this writing, an enormous percentage of job results, I’m talking 25-50% on any given day, are fake. The jobs are listed with company names you’re familiar with, but when you click the links, it leads to a random job board posting on behalf of the company you’re interested in. If you then try to go to the company’s website to verify if the role is real, it won’t be there. This makes their board practically unusable.
Job Scrapers
If you like the idea of doing a broad Google boolean search but don’t want to deal with scams, there are some legit job scraping services out there that scour the web for any and all jobs. These websites are all fairly similar. Typically the folks running the websites manually add company career pages to be scraped - so they can pick up stuff that isn’t posted outside of a company website, and avoid scraping scam postings. The problem with the manual nature of these services is they are all pulling from different sources, so there’s no clear winner as far as who has the “most robust” results.
Two that I’ve tried and like:
Hiring Cafe - Completely Free. Passion project by a solo founder.
Welcome To The Jungle (Otta.com) - The Holy Grail Of Quality Over Quantity
In the brief time between when I started drafting this and publication, Otta.com seems to have been acquired and is now called “Welcome To The Jungle”. Pretty terrible renaming IMO, but it’s still an amazing product.
If you find the job board world overwhelming, or don’t have time to dedicate to a thorough search, WTTJ will do the work for you. You put in specific preferences, and once a day WTTJ will invite you to review roles tailored to you in dating website format. You just “swipe” through the roles it selects for you, and you can click a link to apply directly on the hiring company’s website. No middle-man job board involved. It’s essentially a job scraper that narrows things down to the best of the best. To put it simply… if you spent hours scraping every board I mentioned above, and narrowed it down to the top ten solid roles posted per day, WTTJ would likely serve up 7 of them. Yeah you’re missing a few, but you’re spending 30 seconds to find most of them instead of hours to find all of them.
Auto-Apply Services
Automating job applications is a huge industry right now. These companies typically charge a flat fee and promise a certain number of applications to relevant roles after you provide your resume. Most aren’t great at it - they end up applying to jobs that aren’t relevant to your skillset, apply to spammy companies, and will often input your application information poorly leading to lost opportunities.
The one auto-apply service I can vouch for is ApplyAll. Their service is QC’ed by humans, and they guarantee an interview, or your money back. At the time of this writing their most expensive package per application is priced at less than $2/application. Also, their founder is cool and goes out of her way to get clients hired above and beyond simply QC’ing her team’s work!
Fin.
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Great rundown - agree on all fronts
Give https://corvi.careers a look. It indexes from direct company websites