The majority of jobs are now available online to job seekers everywhere. Employers and recruitment agencies spend a sizeable portion of their budget advertising on job boards and social networks to make sure job seekers find out about their vacancies.
However, advertising on job boards and social networks is a major cost. As a result, companies try to minimize these costs and improve employer branding at the same time by maintaining their own careers/recruitment sites.
There are plenty of job sites that aggregate all open vacancies from job boards and career sites, providing job seekers with an almost ‘one-stop-shop’ for jobs. While job aggregators will have the majority of vacancies on their site, no one site has 100% coverage. And unless you intend to visit every careers site there is, there could be vacancies that you’re not hearing about.
How to find hidden jobs:
What happens then? You can still find out about these ‘hidden’ jobs by searching on Google. Most companies will use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to advertise jobs online and manage the applications they receive. Each ATS will have a website where all of its clients’ jobs will be hosted. You can use some Google magic to search these ATS sites for the jobs you might be missing!
Aplitrak:
One popular ATS is Broadbean’s ‘Aplitrak’ system. All Broadbean’s jobs are hosted on http://aplitrak.com so you can start by typing site:aplitrak.com into Google’s search box. If you’re looking for java developer jobs, type site:aplitrak.com intitle:”java developer”. This will limit the results to all pages that have “java developer” as a job title. You can also use AND to combine your search with the location you’d like to work in, for example:
You can experiment and refine your search by adding more keywords and using additional operators such as OR and NOT. As you get fewer results, you’ll get a more targeted selection of jobs that hopefully match exactly what you’re after.
You’ll find similar search strings below which work for other popular applicant tracking systems:
- site:bullhornreach.com/job intitle:”java developer” AND London
- site:smartrecruiters.com intitle:”java developer” AND London
- site:taleo.net (inurl:careersection OR inurl:requisition) “java developer” AND London
Taleo:
Taleo is an Oracle system widely used by large enterprises. They provide applicant tracking to some of the largest corporations so it’s worth keeping them on your radar.
Unfortunately, a simple search of http://taleo.net will often return lots of irrelevant pages that do not contain jobs. Luckily, jobs on Taleo follow a specific URL structure that contains either “careersection” or “requisition” in the web page address. So to restrict your results to only job-related pages, add (inurl:careersection OR inurl:requisition) to your search string.
Once you’re happy with your search queries, you can go into “Search tools” under the search bar. Click on “Any time” and select “Past week” from the drop-down menu. This limits the results to jobs posted in the past week so you can focus on applying to the newest jobs available.
Bonus Tip:
Add your results page to your bookmarks. Doing so lets you go back to your search whenever you want without having to type the whole search string again. Depending on the time range you’ve set above and how frequently you search for jobs, you can save time by searching only for the most recently posted job advertisements.
