There are several basic job search techniques.  In recent years one of the most effective ways of finding work has become the use of employment sites or, as recruiters say, job sites or “working” sites.

According to our data, there are more than a thousand sites where you can post and search for jobs in the USA.  We mean only mass advertisement boards without crewing sites (marine specialty), recruitment agencies and some special-industry sites.

Which of them are really effective for a job seeker?

Our response as professional recruiters is the following.  The most effective are those sites that are effective from the standpoint of the employer and recruitment agencies as well.  JobTonic, for example, is one of the most often visited sites by employers and applicants throughout the US.

It is not necessary to search for jobs and post resumes on all 1,000 (or even 100) sites, as there are 10-20 TOP sites that accumulate a 95% of all vacancies in the country.  Other sites either duplicate this information or occupy their very narrow niche, or are sites-satellites and clones of the leading websites.

Chase shares tips on online job searching by Gangplank HQ, on Flickr.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

Big companies, for example, use only 6-8 major sites for the placement of vacancies and this is usually sufficient to obtain the desired amount of resumes.

All other 900 odd job sites in the US either partially repeat major job sites, or are their satellite sites and clones, or are in the formation process or on the stage of dying and therefore have very low attendance.

If you are looking for work in a narrow industry, you should definitely take advantage of industry-specific sites.  You can easily find such industry job sites through the search engines just typing, for example, “Jobs for engineers” or something like that.

Do not forget about the regional employment sites that specialize in a particular city and the region.

Although, in most cases the actual number of vacancies at regional sites is certainly inferior to major regional resources sites.

And one more thing, all these sites in general can be called a job board.  Besides them there are still so-called “vacancies aggregators” by the analogy with “news aggregators”.  These sites are looking for job listings throughout the Web: on different employment portals, corporate web sites, sites of recruiting companies.  If you set a request to search for some open positions, you get links to suitable vacancies with more than 50 sites of employment.  Try it yourself!

Follow the index of labor market and good luck with your job search!