The Best Job Search Engine

Searching for appropriate job postings is like searching for a needle in a pile of steel shavings. All the obvious ways to find the needle won't work. Specialized job search engines purport to help find appropriate postings for job seekers. Generally, search engines measure success by the number of results returned. In my experiences the results are largely not good matches for the individual.

Job search engines have some serious challenges:

• Job descriptions and requirements do not have standard formats and vocabulary.
• Job titles are different across companies and industries for comparable skills and functions.
• Industry is key for some job functions and totally irrelevant for others. (For example, do you really care if your payroll expert has construction experience, or are you satisfied that they have payroll experience working with salaried, hourly, and seasonal employees?)

Success for the job seeker is finding jobs that match their particular skills and interests regardless of the challenges the search engines present. Based on my ability to do that with the search engines the best search engines are:

1. Dice.com - Dice has three strengths that made it outstanding during my job search:
   
   
   • A checkbox to restrict the search to job title only
   • The ability to quickly restrict to a region
   • The ability to filter out old jobs
   
   These two strengths let me zero in quickly on a half dozen jobs that I was qualified for and interested in. I may have missed jobs that would have been acceptable, but the jobs I was looking at were always dead on. This is much better than wading through 60 or 70 "matches" that weren't even close, to find one might be close.
   
   I also had a much higher percentage of interviews stemming from postings in Dice than in other job boards/search engines.
   
2. USAjobs.gov, Governmentjobs.com, Virginia Jobs - the government websites have two things to recommend them:
   
   
   • Relevant jobs appeared at the top of the list
   • It is easy in all of them to restrict the region and government agency
   
   The government websites still returned too many irrelevant results and sometimes it is difficult to separate the jobs that are restricted to internal people only.

I'm still looking for a job engine that will let you eliminate jobs that require a security clearance by the level and type of clearance. I'm also still looking for standardized job titles, or some way to quickly distinguish between to different jobs that have the same title for example,"business analyst" - a business analyst seems to be either someone with accounting knowledge who determines the health of the business, or someone who writes requirements for software based on a businesses needs and requests. Few people could do both. I would also like to see job search engines drop the notion of "industry". Most jobs are industry independent.

So, next time I'm looking for a job, I'll pass on most search engines. I'll use the few that work for me. I will sill check specialized job lists.