Where to actually apply: job boards, ranked by what they are for

Find roles wherever you like, but apply on the company’s own careers page whenever one exists. Most job sites are aggregators re-listing postings they scraped, and applying through the copy adds a hop, sometimes loses your application entirely, and always loses the formatting.

This is the single highest-value habit in this post, and it costs an extra ninety seconds per application.

Search wide, apply narrow

Aggregators are genuinely good at discovery — they have everything and their filters work. They are bad at delivery: a scraped listing may be stale, already filled, or routed through a form that maps your resume into fields nobody reads.

So use them as a search engine. When you find something, open the company’s careers page, find the same requisition, and apply there. You will also discover, fairly often, that it is not there — which is your answer about whether the posting is live.

What each type is actually for

• LinkedIn. Strongest for the thing that is not the apply button: finding who works there, who would manage the role, and who you already know at the company. Easy Apply is high-volume and low-yield — it is convenient for you and therefore convenient for everyone.
• Indeed and other large aggregators. Widest coverage, most duplication, most stale listings. Best used with an alert and a narrow query.
• Naukri (India). Where recruiters actually search for candidates rather than the reverse, which makes profile completeness and recency matter more than applications do. Updating the profile bumps you in recruiter search results, and that inbound is the real product.
• ATS-native boards — Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby job boards. These are the source. A posting here is live by definition, and applying here is applying directly.
• Niche boards — by function or by sector. Smaller, but the ratio of applicants to roles is dramatically better, which is the only ratio that matters to you.
• Company careers pages. Pick fifteen companies you would actually join and check them fortnightly. Highest-intent channel there is, and almost nobody does it.

Set up alerts, then stop browsing

Browsing job sites is the most comfortable and least productive part of a job search, and it expands to fill a morning. Three or four saved searches with daily alerts gets you the same coverage in ten minutes.

Make the queries narrow. A search that returns 400 results per day trains you to skim, and skimming is how the right role gets missed.

Recruitment agencies and consultants

Worth registering with two or three in your field; not worth building a search around. They are paid by the employer and work to the employer’s brief, so they are useful when your profile matches a brief they hold and silent when it does not.

An agency that asks you for money is not an agency. No legitimate recruiter charges a candidate a registration, training or placement fee. That is the most common job scam there is — more here.

The allocation that works

If you have ten hours a week for the search, roughly:

• Four hours on people — referral asks and direct notes. Highest conversion, and the part everyone under-does.
• Three hours applying, tailored, direct on company sites.
• Two hours preparing — stories, research on live processes.
• One hour on the profile and the document. One. It is not a full-time activity once it is done.

Most people invert this, spending eight hours on applications and one on people, because applications feel like progress and messages feel like asking.

Where this site fits

In the last hour of that list, and it should stay there. The document matters and it is not where a search is won or lost — diagnosing which stage is actually failing will tell you whether it is even your problem this month.