A job search engine is a website that facilitates job hunting. These sites range from large scale generalist boards to niche markets such as engineering, legal, insurance, social work and teaching. Users can typically deposit their résumés and submit them to potential employers, while employers can post job ads and search for potential employees. The category job search engines below is a list of specific search engines with details about them.
A more recent trend in job search engines is the emergence of vertical search or metasearch engines, which allows job-seekers to search across multiple websites. Some of these new search engines primarily index traditional job boards. These sites aim to provide a “one-stop shop” for job-seekers who don’t need to search the underlying job boards. Tensions have recently developed between the job boards and several scraper sites, with Craigslist recently banning scrapers from its job classifieds and Monster.com specifically banning scrapers through its recent adoption of a robots exclusion standard on all its pages while others like Smuz have embraced them.
Other job search engines index pages only from employers’ websites, choosing to bypass traditional job boards entirely. These vertical search engines allow job-seekers to find new positions that may not be advertised on the traditional job boards. There is a close relationship between these search engines and the emergence of XML based standards in the recruitment industry.
Vertical search is an emerging market with several new startups in this space both in US and in other countries. Major job search engines include: Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com (US), Bixee.com (India), Workhound.co.uk (UK), Eluta.ca, Wowjobs.ca (Canada), JSeeker.com.au (Australia) and Recruit.net (Hong Kong). There is a difference between these “job search engines” (which index jobs freely from employer and other sites) and the more traditional “job boards” (where all the jobs shown are advertisements). Examples of traditional job boards are CareerBuilder, Careersinteractive.com, Bayt.com, Hotjobs and Monster.com.
The job board industry has benefited from both venture capital and mergers and acquisition activity for more than a decade. Several private equity firms are currently in the process of piecing together large job board networks and other firms are simply expanding through acquisition.
A developing trend with both jobs search engines and jobs boards is that many now encourage users to post their CV and contact details. While this is attractive for the site operators (who sell access to the resume bank to headhunters and recruiters), job-seekers should exercise caution in uploading personal information, since they have no control over where their resume will eventually be seen. Their resume may be viewed by a current employer or, worse, by fraudsters who may use information from it to perpetrate identity theft.
The success of jobs search engines in bridging the gap between job seekers and employers have spawned thousands of other job sites, many of which list job opportunities in a specific sector, such as education, health care, hospital management, academics and even in the non-governmental sector. There are reportedly more than 40,000 employment sites in existence today, the largest of which, are represented by The International Association of Employment Web Sites, a trade association for the global online employment services industry.
More and more users are submitting to and searching smaller job boards. Many sites focus on industry or geographical region and are considerably smaller than the major search engines. These sites have advantages for both Employers and Jobseekers. Employers will find advertising at much lower costs with these smaller boards. Where larger search sites will charge hundreds of dollars for 1 posting, smaller sites offer Unlimited Posting accounts at equil value, and sometimes even for free. Jobseekers who take the time to search further into the google or yahoo lists for some of the smaller sites will find lots of jobs, with a lot less competition. However, a search including your geographic region and/or industry will return a wealth of sites for use as either a jobseeker or an employer.