On Tuesday 28th April at 1pm BST, Simon Ward and I will be joined on our weekly LinkedIn Live by CV Library. I'll share the details of this free interactive session as soon as the event link is available - bring your questions. If you don't know CV Library it's one of the main job boards in the UK. While they might sit behind others in terms of coverage, I find them easy to work with and helpful - they are responsive, they have fewer fake jobs than LinkedIn, they have a CV database I can search across that is in many ways more effective than #OpenToWork. They'll be showing how to get a better mileage from their CV database, as a job seeker, and many other helpful things - points you can apply to LinkedIn too, as an inbound sources of recruiter searches and the principles we use to look for viable candidates. It seems timely to share this updated chapter from A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) , which I will no doubt update with learnings from the session. 38 - Better use of job boards Job boards are often the first port of call when new to a job search. It’s a natural inclination that they are where vacancies are to be found. Quickly followed by disappointment, anxiety and frustration when you get close to 0% hit rate. And not even a single reply. Let’s take a step back, look at the overall picture and make a plan. There are many job boards in the UK that sell their systems to employers and recruitment agencies. You may be familiar with Indeed, Reed, CV Library, Jobsite / Totaljobs, LinkedIn (yes, it is a job board, disguised by being a social media platform). Aside from the generic, there are also many sites specific to your niche. As well as ATS platforms themselves. Job boards sell two things to their clients - advertising and access to their CV database. Although LinkedIn differs in how it is wrapped up with content and networking, it does have a form of CV database in how we can use the Recruiter Licence to search profiles (we can even make do without through more advanced techniques such as X-ray searching and programmable search engines). There are also aggregator websites which scrape content from one job board to their own or a third party. You can often tell because when you click apply it takes you to another website instead of properly starting an application. Job board priorities and what that means for you Job boards want to sell their services and make money, which is entirely sensible. To support their argument they use all sorts of metrics such as the number of CVs on their database and the number of applications made (by job or month). It’s to their advantage that adverts receive as many applications as possible - their advice on improving advert performance is geared around volume. Rather than around suitable candidates. This disconnect happens because clients often lie about how effective adverts have been by the measure of vacancies filled - because of concern it will affect renewal prices. This is feedback given to me from account managers at two different job boards when researching job search advice. Job boards can only prove the number of applications, so that becomes the target. The most effective job adverts have fewer applications and a higher number of suitable candidates - what I aim for in mine. To maximise the number of applications they do things like scraping, aggregation and affiliate arrangements. They offer services like automatic relisting where an advert is reposted as new once a week throughout the term of the listing (could be up to 6 weeks by default, or longer by choice). These are sold as benefits to employers which might help when there are limited candidates, yet often hinder when there are too many candidates for jobs. You may remember the same from Fake jobs (p81). They make it as Easy as possible for you to Apply for these jobs, so that you can be an additional metric. As Goodhart says, ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.’ The consequence for you as an applicant is twofold. You are encouraged to be one of the numbers of applicants to purposefully generic adverts you are not the most suitable for. When you are the most suitable, you are in competition both with people from the line above and people who are wholly unsuitable. I should point out I don’t think job boards do this cynically. They do so because they think high numbers are best. It’s also a problem for recruiters who may find it impossible to deal with this volume unless through automation or by finding ways to manually eliminate applications at scale. Job boards, employers, agencies and candidates are all wrapped up in this cycle of speed and volume. And with use of AI-style automation, so too are many job seekers. Where's the specificity and accuracy? Though it might be the best way to make money. Job seekers are accountable too, partly because of how they have been trained to apply. Don’t blame recruiters. Don’t blame employers. Don’t blame unqualified applicants. Blame the system we are all part of. And if you ever find yourself a hiring authority - be the change you hope for. Better use of job boards Let’s go back to that point about applications. In the current market, it’s not uncommon to see hundreds to thousands of applications per vacancy. Rarely are those applications qualified candidates. For a typical job description templated advert you can expect the high majority of applicants to be wholly unsuitable. What do I mean by wholly unsuitable? People who require work permits when a role doesn’t sponsor them. People who don’t meet the minimum requirements set out in an advert. People who are clearly unsuitable for this role. When you see a number, don’t be disheartened by the number alone. As a job seeker, your minimum requirement to apply for a vacancy should be that you can logically prove to yourself you are qualified based on the evidence provided. Read back through Should I customise my CV? (p178) for more on this. … tips and bits Finding vacancies is as important as applying for them. Collect those synonyms you’ve been tailoring your CV with and use these in your searches. If you find an obscure term which represents what you can do, why not search solely on that term? You might find a horribly written advert whose only correct word is that term. It’s a trick we use to find candidates too - occasionally I might search on something like ‘egnieer’ because typos don’t make a bad candidate. Location is a key search criterion. Most people search from their home address. How about running tight searches where you are prepared to work - e.g. 1 mile from CB4 0WZ (a hub for business parks in Cambridge where I worked many moons ago). How to optimise for CV databases When you apply for a vacancy on a new job board they will likely have a CV database tethered to your application. Your permission to have your CV added may be hidden in their terms and conditions. A CV database is an opportunity for you to be found. Sometimes this will be for vacancies that are never advertised, such as the example I wrote about earlier. You have an opportunity to leverage CV databases to improve the number of inbound enquiries you receive. Log all the job boards you’ve applied through Make a list of all that have CV databases, including login details Ensure your CV is up to date containing the keywords for the job you are most suitable for Check your contact details are correct Check all the details on your account. Salary details, location, preferences should all be current. Register your postcode for where you want to be found. If you plan to move to Scunthorpe in April, that should be your current location. It’s where we will look for you Update your CV and profiles once a week. It shouldn’t take long. If you are active in the past week, this will show up in recruiter searches, assuming a recruiter only looks at activity from the past 14 days The CV databases at the back end of job boards are one of the resources I use to fill roles whether advertised or not. They’re a good marginal gain and may bring you leads you’d never hear about otherwise. A note on the ATS Whenever you come across an advert linked to an ATS like Workable, many companies will use that ATS. These may recruit for relevant vacancies in a commutable location. Try this command in Google - site: workable.com London “Marketing Manager” Site: directs the search to a particular website. Change the location and job title to ones relevant for you. Some of these vacancies may never make it to a job board you are aware of. Why you should hack LinkedIn advert results URLs (website page addresses) are a funny thing - they often contain commands for a website related to your requests. Changing certain points can have interesting results. For example, here’s a URL for a job search for Marketing Manager near me over the past 24 hours: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search-results/?f_TPR=r86400&keywords=Marketing%20Manager&origin=JOBS_HOME_SEARCH_BUTTON Don’t worry about the bulk of the URL. Take note of the bold - r86400 which matches seconds in a day. Let’s say you log on at 9.30am and you want to check jobs posted in the last hour. This feature isn’t available as standard in the search tools. However, you can edit the URL from a standard search to: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search-results/?f_TPR=r3600&keywords=Marketing%20Manager&origin=JOBS_HOME_SEARCH_BUTTON Because there are 3,600 seconds in an hour. Try it and see what happens. (Edit: in error checking for this article, originally updated in January, this particular ‘hack’ no longer appears to work. Why not try it yourself on a job you’re interested in and let me know if it works for you? I’ll update this properly for the next book update. I've left it here to show how this kind of tactical advice can change so quickly as to make it obsolete. Next week's article is on Content Strategy & Philosophy for promoting yourself on LinkedIn. Call it personal branding, call it copywriting - expect some people to jump on with strong opinions without reading the article)