Many folks I talk with are frustrated and overwhelmed with the emails they receive from Indeed, CareerBuilder, ZipRecruiter and other job boards. There are way too many, and most are not that relevant! Usually this is the result of registering on the site, then being asked whether you want to receive notifications of similar jobs to ones you have viewed.
If you accept this offer of “push” notifications, the problems can start soon thereafter. Why? Think about it….
“Similar” can mean almost anything. Similar in location, salary, duties, title --- but not necessarily in the field or at the level you are looking for. Or it could mean that the job title includes one of the words in your search string, not all of them.
The job site wants to send out more notifications – so they can show the metrics to their paying customers (employers).
When many of the jobs in your inbox don’t fit your profile, it can be very discouraging. Plus it takes longer to plow through them to find the needle in the haystack – that ideal job.
What to do then? I recommend two things:
If you want a daily email of relevant postings, use Google Jobs. You can use quotation marks around your search string to precisely limit your hits to relevant jobs. Also you can try different search strings out to find one that works the best. For more on how to do this, see my article elsewhere on this site.
Google Jobs does not cover Indeed. There may be other sites it does not cover as well. If you want to check Indeed jobs, log on and do a search every few days. As with Google, try different strings until you find the one(s) that work(s) best. If you search every three days, and sort by date posted, you will see fresh jobs that meet your criteria. But take a pass on the automatic notification.
Some job categories are well covered by local Craigslist pages. Others, especially higher level positions, are not. See my article about Craigslist for more information on whether you should be looking there. If Craigslist turns out to be a good source for you, and you are tech savvy, you can set up an RSS feed for your search. More on that in a future post.