By Jiaqi Wang

Photo by Zbigniew Bielecki on Unsplash

Indeed.com

Indeed.com claims to be the No. 1 online job search engine in the world. It has a wide coverage in more than 50 countries and is available in 26 different languages. The major feature of this site is the free access to hundreds of recent job postings, which makes job hunting so much easier. In addition, the job pool is not limited to business or engineering fields; users can find job postings in any profession. If you click on any position that interests you, the site will take you to the original job posting website where you can apply directly.

Indeed provides a useful tutorial for first-time users.

Some users may suspect that if Indeed.com does not profit from job seekers then it might, like many other search engines, charge employers or recruiters a service fee for improving the ranking of their job postings. To dispel this potential misconception, Indeed.com claims that the search results are solely based on relevance and dates, and they do not receive payment to increase the visibility of certain job postings.

One weakness of Indeed.com is that it does not screen job postings, so job seekers should scrutinize employer websites. In addition, Indeed.com does not guarantee that users can find salary information for each posting; however it does offer a Salary Search Tool through which an estimated salary (based on similar jobs) is provided for personal reference.

Generally, Indeed.com is a valuable search engine for job seekers. To make job hunting even more efficient, let us take a look at another similar websites which offers some features that could supplement Indeed.com.

The Ladders

Like Indeed.com, The Ladders is also a community for both job seekers and employers/recruiters. Since this site focuses on business world, it has substantially fewer job postings related to education, the arts, and the humanities.

Users can find several helpful features on the site. Every time you search for a job, for example, the site returns results organized by both “area of expertise” and “industry.” This prevents users from browsing too many irrelevant job postings. In addition, if you click on a job listing, the website will offer you basic profiles of other applicants (for the same job), including degree, years of experience, salary, and other details. Also, the site will display charts showing your position in the pool. With this extra information, job seekers can not only obtain the description of the jobs themselves but also make a reasonable estimation of the success rate.

The Ladders offers two memberships: the free version (Basic Membership) grants members limited access to job postings, while the paid membership plan is more extensive. If you do not need thousands (compared to hundreds) of job listings and you do not need direct access to potential employers/recruiters, then the Basic Membership may serve your purposes.

Glassdoor.com

Similar to the two sites above, Glassdoor.com is a job search engine open to all professions. What makes it stand out, however, lies in its colossal network of employees sharing information regarding their companies, which including salaries, interview details, and reviews.

The salaries section is very useful in that it organizes salary information in multiple ways. If you are just curious about the compensation level of a particular profession, the site offers both a national and a regional median. With that in mind, job seekers are able to gain a preliminary knowledge of which city might best suit them. In addition, if you have a specific company in mind and you want to know how that company is compensating its employees, the site displays all the available job titles (within that company) with averaged salary figures for your personal reference. This section largely builds up job seekers’ relevant knowledge and, thus, renders them more active if they need to negotiate their compensations.

The interviews section, as the name implies, offers a platform for discussing interview questions given by companies. This feature is fairly new compared to other job search engines, but is an extremely helpful one for learning about what types of questions to expect, what types of interviews are conducted (e.g., online, in-person, and on-campus), and what type of knowledge is highly valued in typical interviews. You can also frequently find other job seekers’ reflections in this section, and get a sense of a company’s culture and history.

To sum up, the three job search engines outlined above are very useful resources for job seekers—particularly those who are interested in nonacademic positions. If this sounds like you, be sure to take a look.