Job Hunting in UK Higher Education IV: Other Sources of Vacancy Information

Other Job Sites

The THES and jobs.ac.uk dominate the academic sector job market. People like myself who find that the academic world suits them will almost certainly find these the best sites to use for a general job search. Is it worth augmenting a search using other sites?

There may be more important factors than working in the academic sector for job choice, and it is obviously advisable to look at sites which work well for the searcher's requirements. For example, the British Computer Society site has much narrower location restrictions to its searches than either THES or jobs.ac.uk, while its "IT Industry Sector" criteria are much wider than the kind of academic subject based searching jobs.ac.uk offers, making it very useful for people searching for IT vacancies who do not want to relocate to a new job. Other more localised sites might also help - such as Cambridge's Science Park vacancy list: but in this case, not all companies based in the Science Park list their vacancies on the site, and during the period when I was searching, the site went through a major facelift, which meant that the bookmarked link I had to the vacancies page became obsolete twice, which is irritating.

For people interested in specific universities, their own sites may include vacancies which are not more widely advertised. (Most of the links in advertisements elsewhere will direct the enquirer to these sites.) Their design is quite diverse, with the University of Cambridge being to my mind particularly good: clear, without too many website bells and whistles to get in the way of the content. On some university sites, there is no obvious "browse current vacancies"; a full listing is usually then obtainable by entering nothing into the search form and just pressing the search button. Leicester is an example of this, and compounds what I would view as poor usability practice by imposing a time out on the results listing in addition to only displaying 10 results per page, which means that the searcher needs to view all the results (about 40) in fairly quick succession. However, generally speaking the smaller number of vacancies makes a university's own listing easy to browse.

Other Information Sources: The Future?

Another source of vacancy information is through mailing lists, forums, and other online communities which are relevant to the vacancy being advertised. Although I had in every case already seen the vacancies advertised elsewhere, I saw several on lists which I subscribe to, and others were forwarded to me by friends. The vacancies which appear on such lists tend to be posted by individuals who have an interest in the post and who happen to be users of the list: the prospective line manager, for example, rather than the human resources department posting them on relevant lists as a matter of course. The reason is of course obvious, as there are far too many lists and forums around for non-specialists to know which are the most useful ones on which to post a particular vacancy.

Most of these methods are, to be honest, fairly backward looking - email mailing lists have been around for decades and were, along with usenet, used for job hunting almost as long as they have been in existence. The vacancies now seen there seem (from the admittedly limited sample available to me) to be mainly technical IT posts with fairly low salaries.

But social networks are now beginning to be used for job hunting and by headhunters - and this is, I think, likely to be the future of the job market. LinkedIn is probably the best example around in 2010 of how this might happen. I didn't use it myself, but I've found several useful looking pages which suggest how best to use it: here, here (probably particularly good for beginners), and here. You may think you need to build up a large network of contacts on the network to make it useful for job hunting, but this post is good news for those of us who haven't done this. Other professional networking sites might well be helpful, particularly subject specific ones - the British Computer Society runs one for its members, for example, which is just getting off the ground. But LinkedIn has the biggest reach, among professional networking sites; personal sites like Facebook are likely to be less helpful.