A second-year master’s student asks—

I'm looking for jobs and, so far, have just been searching on LinkedIn. Where else should I be looking?

Large job boards like LinkedIn Jobs, Indeed, Google Jobs, etc. can be a good resource for finding job postings, but I wouldn’t recommend making them the main focus of your job search based on a couple limitations. First, it can be very difficult to figure out the right way to search such a large list so that you see everything relevant to you, but don’t have to do a ton of sorting through postings that aren’t right for you. This ends up being very time intensive, as well as potentially psychologically draining as you spend more time looking at things you won’t apply for than things you will. Second, and perhaps more serious, is the fact that a substantial number of postings on these sites aren’t up to date with accurate information, aren’t connected to real opportunities that still exist, or aren’t technologically connected to the company in the right way to actually get your application in.

We generally recommend a strategy that gets you away from scrolling on LinkedIn and is instead focused on generating a list of 35 or so organizations you are interested in working for. Personally, I recommend organizing your job search with a folder of bookmarks of each company’s ‘careers’ (or ‘jobs’ or ‘hiring’ or ‘join the team’ etc.) page from their own website. This makes it way more likely that you can view job openings in a non-overwhelming way, and you can be very confident that your application will end up in the right place. As a bonus, you can also compare different jobs at the same organization more easily this way (if you are unsure of what level of seniority to apply for, for example).

So, the remaining question is, how do you populate your list of organizations? Here, I think scrolling LinkedIn can be very helpful! You can look for job postings at a very general level to decide where you are interested in working, and add those organizations’ careers pages to your list of bookmarks. Even more effectively, you can use LinkedIn to find people who are doing or have done the kind of work you are interested in and generate additions to your list based on their work history. Finally, you should definitely let people in your own network know what you are looking for, as it will often be very easy for them to make recommendations of organizations to add to your list as well. If you use all three approaches, you should be able to generate your list of 35 organizations without too much difficulty.

-David Blancha, Assistant Director, Career Development Team for Researchers