Where to Look to Find the Right Job Vacancies?

The best place would be the website of the company itself, but that makes the search rather complicated. Job boards are a useful medium to simplify a job search. There are, however, countless job boards claiming to have the best vacancies, just for you. Signing up to each single one, is not only a time consuming activity, but will not result in receiving more unique vacancies. You will be swamped in e-mails offering the same jobs and going through them is not only a tedious task, but also a discouraging one.

The most effective way to find suitable vacancies depends on the kind of job you are looking for. Certain industries have their own job boards. For example, meesterbaan.nl focuses on teaching jobs in primary, secondary and higher education;whereas juridischevacaturebank.nl focuses on legal jobs. Most industries have their own job boards; a simple Internet search will give you the most important hits.

Besides the industry specialised job boards, there are more generic job boards like monsterboard.nl, intermediair.nl and nationalevacaturebank.nl. On these boards you can often find information about writing cover letters, drafting CVs etc. Intermediair.nl,for example, also offers a digital magazine, with articles, tips and experiences about job hunting.

To make it more manageable, there are a few sites, such as jobrapido.com, that collect vacancies from several job boards and present them on their own site. When opening a vacancy, you will be redirected to the original site - this is often a different job board.

Although, LinkedIn originally was not meant as a job board, it is a perfect place to find jobs. LinkedIn is often associated with higher education; therefore, the jobs are aimed for such candidates. However, this is not exclusively the case, since drugstores such as Etos and Kruidvat post their vacancies for shop assistants on their LinkedIn profile just as Shell does.

The advantage of searching on LinkedIn is that the website shows how you are connected to the vacancy via your network. When you are in luck one of your first-degree contacts knows the vacancy-holder, and can introduce you to that person.

There are plenty of ways to find the perfect vacancy. It is advisable to use two or three different platforms and subscribe to them in order to receive new vacancies via e-mail. When you are looking for a specialised job, signing up to a job board focused on this specialisation is a good start. You will learn which boards can offer jobs that suit your profile and which ones are just not right through practice as you search.

Cecile Koster