Best job boards

If you’re looking for a full-time job — or even a part-time position — a good place to start your search is a job board. Job boards offered at sites like Indeed, Glassdoor and FlexJobs post thousands of openings in a wide variety of fields — much like the classified advertising pages of yesteryear. But the best job boards for your search will depend on what you want to do and how you want to do it.

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Best job boards

In today’s highly fragmented job market, there are dozens of good job boards. Some cater to a single industry; others to a concept, such as remote or flexible work. What makes the best job boards stand out is that they make your search easy by centralizing the offers and helping you sort to find what you need. But since so many job boards specialize, we’ve broken the best job boards down by category.

Remote work

Remote work took off during the pandemic. But now that the pandemic is officially over, an increasing number of companies are calling their workers back into offices.

No longer willing to commute? Three sites screen job offers by whether they offer flexible, hybrid and work-from-home offers. Two sites charge for the service, one site doesn’t charge, but has more limited listings.

To be specific, FlexJobs charges $10 a week, $25 a month or $60 per year for its job-seeker subscriptions. If the site doesn’t deliver, it offers a money-back guarantee. Job seekers here say there’s little need for it, though. For that price, the site filters through thousands of job listings, ferrets out scams and culls the site for legitimate flexible and remote opportunities. Members also get resume help and career advice. You can sign up with FlexJobs here.

Like FlexJobs, Virtual Vocations is a curated job board for work-at-home positions. You can create a free account here. And that will generate regular emails about jobs that appear to meet your search criteria. But the site only gives you the ability to apply to just handful of “free” jobs in any given month. To apply for the bulk of the job options listed here, you must pay a membership fee. Virtual Vocations memberships are $20 a month or $70 for six-months.

Finally, SkiptheDrive also offers a job board for remote work. However, the site is far more limited in the types of jobs it offers, with just 25 job categories to search through and many of them in tech. That said, there’s no cost to use the service. So there’s little downside to starting a search here, particularly if you’re interested in tech.

Seasonal Work

Students and retirees, who might want to combine work with travel, should check out CoolWorks and VegaJobs. These job boards list temporary positions in resorts, summer camps, ski lodges and with adventure travel companies. Open positions include white-water rafting trip guides, horse wranglers, as well as cooks, waiters, housekeepers and camp counselors. This is generally not highly paid work, but it often comes with subsidized housing and meals.

Both sites charge employers to advertise their open positions, so there’s no cost for job seekers to search and apply.

Professional jobs

There are an extraordinary number of firms that can help professionals seek full-time, remote, temporary, part-time, contract and other flexible positions. Three stand out. All three charge employers for the job-matching service, so there’s no cost to the job seeker.

Robert Half is a well-established staffing firm that has millions of job placements under its belt. The site focuses on five broad employment areas: Law, Finance & Accounting, Technology, Marketing & Creative and Administrative & Customer support. Dive into any of these categories and you find a wide range of job listings. Finance and accounting jobs, for instance, include everything from collection managers to senior staff accountants. Jobs in law range from Corporate Counsel to file clerk. Paralegals to Associates.

SMA Inc. is an engineering firm that launched a “Talent on Demand” portal aimed at enlisting engineers, project managers, proposal experts, graphic designers and desktop publishers. The site’s onboarding process is extensive, but well worth the time for those with the right skills.

FlexProfessionals works with small businesses, governments and non-profits to place professionals in a wide array of flexible, part-time and contract positions. The one caveat with this platform is that it primarily offers jobs in the Washington, D.C. and Boston areas. And, while the hours are flexible, many of these jobs require in-person work.

Film, television, theater

Whether you act or provide technical services to the film, television and theater communities through set design or construction, lighting, sound, costumes, make-up or the like, there are literally dozens of sites that aim to provide you with job listings. Unfortunately, the glamour of this type of work draws so much interest that many sites charge for largely worthless services. There are a few notable exceptions.

StaffMeUp is a highly-effective job board for all positions in film and television that allows both job seekers and employers to post and search for jobs for free. The site does have a premium plan that allows unlimited applications and some bells-and-whistles such as the ability to evaluate your chance of getting any individual position. However, searching the job board and applying for up to 5 positions is completely free. Moreover, you can post a profile here that allows producers to find you.

The one caveat: You need to have experience to list your profile here. If you are a complete newcomer, sites like Playbill and Backstage also have free job listings. However, Backstage charges an annual fee if you want to apply for the jobs through the site.

General

If you’re seeking work in almost any industry, there are two multi-purpose job boards that are worth singling out — Indeed and Glassdoor. With hundreds of thousands of job listings all over the country, both sites are a great place to seek work. Of the two, Indeed’s job search function is a bit more robust, allowing you to search for remote jobs and part-time gigs.

Neither is particularly good at singling out flexible and remote jobs. (You can search for remote work, but the listings are relatively scant vs. what you’ll find with FlexJobs.) However, they both publish employee reviews, which provide a wealth of information about working conditions, pay and management at the companies listing jobs on the sites. And, when it comes to finding full-time work, they’re both excellent and free sources of information.

6/5/2023