I’ve been using some of the newer job engines lately in my job search. I have to admit that for the sole purpose of searching the internet for specified job posts, I find this type of site much easier to navigate, and more importantly, they return better results.

Job engines (job board aggregaters) are the latest form of job boards. They are really just verticals of search engines and work the same way search engines work.

Basically, the user types in two search criteria: a job title and a location. The job title (plumber, accountant) doesn’t even have to be a traditional title. It can be a skill (C++, sales) or industry type (informatics, insurance) or a company name (Apple, IBM). Your location can again be as vague or as specific as you want it to be (city, state, country, zipcode).

Once the search criteria is entered, the site will go out and spider or web crawl thousands of existing job sites for you and retrieve all positions that match your criteria.

The jobs are presented to the user in an easy view format with additional drill down options that allows you to refine your search.  This is true for both simplyhired and indeed. They are the top two job engines in North America (if you are in Canada, also check out eluta.ca).

The advantage to this search type is that if you know what you are looking for, you can run a search extremely quickly and get accurate results on your first search. Also, the results are coming in from thousands of different sites so there is a wider selection of jobs to view and apply to.

Job engines are not great if you don’t know what you are looking for. Sometimes it helps if you have job categories to search through to help you get a better idea as to what type of job you want. Also, when you go to apply to a job, you have to register and complete a separate application on each site. This is because all the jobs that are returned in your search results actually live on another site. So if you are planning on applying to multiple jobs, it becomes a bit annoying to have to go through the registration/resume upload process over and over again.

I would also recommend sticking to niche sites if you have a good one available to you that is industry specific. For example, Dice is simply superior for the IT industry. Although niche sites don’t always have the best job search results, they usually are equipped with excellent career resource tools and industry specific information.

Remember, this post is talking specifically to the act of searching jobs and getting the best search results. I have not been able to prove which method is actually the best for finding a job. Once I’m able to figure that one out, I’ll let you know.