published September 21, 2016

10 Reasons Aggregators May Be Ignoring Your Jobs

Finding your job after posting it to job aggregators can be tricky. Here’s why it’s not showing up.

Job search aggregators don’t always work the way you think. You do everything right, or least what you assume would be right, but when you try to search for the job on the site, it doesn’t come up. You paid the fee, spent time writing a job title and job description to match the position so that your job posting will attract qualified candidates, so why isn’t it showing up? You perform a search as if you were a potential job seeker and can’t find your job posting. We are here to tell you 10 reasons why it may take more time to sort through the competition so that your listing shows up on top.
  1. Sponsors: There will likely be pages of results related to your job posting. Those that are sponsored will get first dibs for the first page of results. The aggregator search results may also produce organic and paid listings.
  2. Funding: In most instances, sponsored job campaigns can have set daily and monthly budgets to accommodate all job postings for that time. If your campaign budget does not support all the included jobs, then those jobs will no longer be shown once the budget is maxed out.
  3. Old date: Aggregators will set limits on how long a posting can show up on their site in order to give job seekers the most current results on a search. Check to see what the site allows – 30, 60, 90 days, or more. Also, if you try to sponsor an old posting straight from the applicant tracking system, the posting date will set off red flags, resulting in the aggregator not allowing the post to show.
  4. Cookies: Aggregators will track the behavior of users through their cookies to provide a personalized experience on future visits. If you are searching for your job postings, but not actually clicking on them, then the site may not think you are interested in the job. If the aggregator does not think you are interested in the position then they will bury those results to deliver others it sees as more fitting. Clear your cookies or use a private browser for the searches, such as Google Chrome’s Incognito Windows. Be careful about clicking on your postings. Some aggregators will charge you for clicking on them.
  5. Special characters: Putting special characters in your job title such as hyphens, dashes, backslashes, etc. will make it difficult for relevant search engine results. For example, if you created your job title to be “IT – San Francisco” but people searched “IT San Francisco” or other variations without the special character you included in the title, then the aggregator will not match your listings to what is searched.
  6. Search terms: Job aggregators receive hundreds and even thousands of job postings every day. While you may think that creating a post that will be easily searchable is best, your listing may get lost in the masses. Try to be more specific in what you are looking for such as “Software Developer in San Francisco”. This will narrow down the results, but is not so specific that no one will come across your listing.
  7. Time: With so many jobs being posted on aggregator systems every day, it may take a little time for your job posting to show up. Give the system some time before searching and expecting it to appear right before you.
  8. Wrong term: You may search a term such as “technology” and expect to find your listing of “Software Developers”. However, if you don’t have technology listed in the title, the aggregator system may not register the connection. If your job does make it to the results pages, it may be ranked very low.
  9. Already exists: There may be multiple people posting the same job in the same organization, by the employer, or the staffing agency, so aggregators will flag the postings as duplicates. The posting will appear only once on the search aggregator, making things easier for job seekers, but making it a possibility that your listing will stay at the bottom.
  10. You missed something (double check): We have all made the mistake of looking for something only to realize it is right in front of us. This could be the same reason that you are having trouble finding your listing when you search for it. There may be an obvious reason for the listing not to show up, such as it is no longer active because of the aggregator’s guidelines, or if you set it up with a time limit. Or you may be making one of the above mistakes, so the listing is just not appearing in your results. The competition to get on the first page of results is fierce.
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