Methodology
How boards get into this directory, how recommendations are ranked, and what we have and have not verified.
What FindJobBoards is
A decision-support tool for whoever has to answer "where should I advertise this vacancy?". You describe a role, and we return a shortlist of job boards that plausibly reach the right candidates, with the reasoning shown.
It is not a job board, and it is not a job search engine. We do not host vacancies and we do not collect applications. Every posting link sends you to the board's own site.
How boards are selected
Entries are added by hand. A person visits the board, reads what it says about itself and its employer pages, and records only what that source states. There is no automated harvesting of listings, and no board is added because it paid to be.
Every fact we store carries the page it came from and the date it was read. Where a board does not state something, the field stays empty and the site says so rather than estimating. The directory currently holds 74 boards.
How recommendations are ranked
Ranking is deterministic: the same vacancy always produces the same shortlist. No language model is involved in the recommendation. Your role text is matched against a controlled list of categories and specialisms, and your location against a list of cities, countries and regions.
Boards are then scored, weighted roughly in this order:
- Role fit — does the board specialise in this kind of work? A board that lists your exact specialism scores far above one that merely covers the sector.
- Geographic reach — can it reach candidates where the job is? A board covering a city also counts as covering that city's country.
- Work arrangement — does it handle remote, hybrid or on-site roles as the vacancy requires?
- Specificity — for the same query, a niche board is more useful than a general one, so niche boards score higher.
- Recency and confidence — a board we checked recently ranks above one we have not looked at in months, and the older one says so on the card.
Two rules matter more than the weights. A board whose recorded coverage cannot reach the location is excluded rather than ranked low, because showing it would waste your time. And a board with no role relevance at all is never presented as a specialist match, however local and well-documented it is.
Where we have never verified a board's geography, it stays in the list and is labelled unverified. Not having checked something is not the same as knowing it does not apply.
What the match labels mean
Labels describe relevance to your query, nothing more. They are not a prediction that you will hire someone, and they are deliberately words rather than percentages, because a number like "94% match" would imply an accuracy we do not have.
- Excellent match
- Specialises in this role and reaches the location.
- Strong match
- Clearly relevant, with one weaker dimension.
- Good match
- Worth considering, with real gaps.
- Broader option
- A general board that covers the location. Larger audience, less targeted.
Freshness and confidence
Job boards change their pricing, their focus and sometimes their existence. Every board page shows when its details were last checked, in one of four states:
- Fresh
- A person verified the details within the last 30 days.
- Recently checked
- Verified within 90 days, or the site was confirmed reachable recently.
- Needs verification
- Between three and six months since anyone looked.
- Possibly stale
- More than six months. Treat the details as indicative.
An automated check only confirms that a site responds. That is weaker evidence than a person reading the page, so it never counts as fully fresh.
What can be incomplete
Pricing is the least reliable field on any directory of this kind, because boards change it often and many quote on request. We show a price only when the board publishes one, and we show the date we read it. Anything else says "pricing not yet verified".
Geographic coverage and remote support are recorded from what a board states about itself. Where it says nothing, we leave the field empty rather than inferring from its name.
We do not publish traffic or audience-size estimates. We have no way to verify them, and an unverifiable number in a comparison table would be acted on as though it were a fact.
Paid placement
Nothing on this site is paid placement today. No board has paid to be listed, and no board has paid for its position.
If sponsored listings are introduced, two things will hold: they will be labelled "Sponsored" wherever they appear, and they will be inserted separately rather than mixed into the ranking. The ranking code cannot read a board's paid status at all — the data it receives does not include those fields. That is a structural guarantee, not a policy.
Corrections
If you run a job board and something here is wrong, the fastest fix is the "Suggest an update" link on your board's page. If you would like to maintain the entry, use the claim link on the same page. We review changes by hand.
Recruiters can suggest a board we are missing from any results page.
Our crawler
We make a small number of automated requests to check that boards are still reachable and that their posting and pricing pages still work. The crawler identifies itself asFindJobBoardsBot, respects robots.txt, and requests a handful of pages per board at most.
It does not collect job listings, does not attempt to get past any access control or bot protection, and does not use rotating addresses. Where a site cannot be checked politely, we mark it for a human to look at instead.