Methodology
How boards get into this directory, how their facts are gathered and dated, 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 short, ranked list 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 discovered
Boards come from three sources: research into the niches recruiters search for, boards submitted through the submission form, and boards their operators claim or correct. A board is never added because it paid to be, and no board pays to stay.
How the facts are gathered
Every fact about a board is read from that board's own public pages — its homepage, employer pages and pricing page — never from another directory. Each fact is stored with the page it came from and the date it was read; the board page shows both.
The reading is done with AI-assisted tooling operated by the site's operator.For the current corpus, software agents fetched each board's public pages and recorded what those pages state, following the same rules a person would: record only what the source says, leave a field empty rather than guess, and never bypass a block. The operator reviews the process and the entries that reach the site, and corrects entries that recruiters or board owners report. Not every entry has been independently re-read by a person; the confidence level on each board page says which have.
A board only enters the recommendations once a dated check has seen it working.That means the site loads, still functions as a job board, and shows evidence its listings are current — posting dates, a job count that moves, a working employer path. What was seen is stored with the board, so the reason it is here can be traced. A board we cannot confirm is held back rather than recommended: it stays in the directory's review queue, invisible to search, until someone can check it. Boards found closed, parked or no longer recruiting are marked closed and drop out of recommendations, keeping their page for anyone holding an old link.
Where a board does not state something, the field stays empty and the site shows a dash or says "not verified" rather than estimating. The directory currently holds 293 active boards.
How recommendations are ranked
Ranking is deterministic: the same vacancy always produces the same shortlist, and no language model is involved in producing it. Your role text is matched against a controlled list of categories and specialisms, and your location against a list of cities, countries and regions.
Eligible boards are then scored, weighted roughly in this order:
- Role fit — is the board for this kind of work? A board that lists your exact specialism, or whose declared focus is your sector, scores far above one that merely lists the sector among many.
- Geographic reach — can it reach candidates where the job is? A board covering a city also counts as covering that city's country. A board that reaches your country only through a region-wide tag, while its recorded listings are in another country, scores lower and says so.
- 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 read 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 recommendation, however local and well-documented it is.
Where we have never verified a board's geography, it stays in the list, marked as unverified, and cannot receive the top label. Not having checked something is not the same as knowing it does not apply.
What the 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. Each card also shows three criteria — role, location, work setup — with a tick, a tilde for a partial fit, a question mark for something unverified, or a cross.
- Highly recommended
- Set up for this kind of role and reaches the location, with nothing important unverified.
- Recommended
- Clearly relevant, with one weaker or unverified dimension.
- Worth considering
- Worth a look, with a real gap: unverified coverage, a different home market, or a partial role fit.
- Broader alternative
- A general board that covers the location. Larger audience, less targeted.
A label is capped by evidence, not only by score. A board with unverified coverage, or whose recorded market is another country, cannot be labelled "Highly recommended" for a location-specific search however well the rest of it fits.
Freshness and confidence
Job boards change their pricing, their focus and sometimes their existence. Every board page shows when its details were last read, in one of four states:
- Fresh
- The details were read from the board's site within the last 30 days.
- Recently checked
- Read within 90 days, or the site was confirmed reachable recently.
- Needs verification
- Between three and six months since the details were read.
- Possibly stale
- More than six months. Treat the details as indicative.
An automated reachability check only confirms that a site responds. That is weaker evidence than reading the page, so it never counts as fully fresh. The confidence level shown on a board page rises only on evidence: a board its owner has confirmed is "verified", a board read recently and confirmed reachable is "high", and a board with no current evidence is "not yet verified".
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 and the page we read it from. Anything else shows as unverified.
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, its currency or its domain.
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. Two boards are operated by the same person who operates this site (InfoSec Job Board and AI Hiring Board); they are treated exactly like every other board, and each of their pages carries a disclosure saying so.
If sponsored listings are introduced, two things will hold: they will be labelled "Sponsored" wherever they appear, and they will be shown 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. A person reviews every change before it is published.
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 person to look at instead.