How to get alerts for new jobs on any careers page
The best roles often appear on a company's own careers page days before they reach the big job sites, and some never reach them at all. If there are a handful of companies you'd love to work for, it's worth watching their careers pages directly. This guide covers the ways to do that, from the free and manual to the fully automatic, and how to keep the alerts useful.
Start with a short list of companies
Watching fifty companies sounds thorough, but it turns into noise you stop reading. Pick the ten or so you'd genuinely move for. For each one, find the page that lists every open role. It's usually linked as Careers, Jobs, Join us or Work with us in the site's footer.
Make sure you watch the list itself, not a single job advert. A single advert only changes when that role closes. The list changes every time a new role is added, which is what you want to hear about.
Check whether the company already offers alerts
Many careers sites are run on hiring platforms that have their own job alerts or an RSS feed. Look for a Get job alerts button, a Subscribe link, or a small feed icon. If there is one, sign up: it's free and it comes straight from the source.
The catch is that every company's alerts look different, arrive at different times, and often include every role in every country. Five companies means five styles of email to sift through.
Use a job board search for the wider market
For roles at companies you haven't heard of yet, a saved search on a job board is still the best tool. Run the search with your job title and location, then copy the address from your browser's address bar. That address keeps your filters, so you can watch the results page like any other page.
Job boards also tend to offer their own email alerts and feeds. Where a feed exists, it's usually the most reliable way to follow a search, because it was built to be read automatically.
Let a monitoring service do the checking
A page monitoring service visits each careers page on a schedule and tells you when something changes. The useful ones go a step further and tell you what changed in plain words, such as “New job: Product Designer, London”, rather than sending a screenshot with highlighted text.
When you set one up for job hunting, look for:
- Alerts that name the new role and location
- A rule you can write in your own words, such as “only tell me about jobs in London or remote”
- Checks a few times a day, which is plenty for job listings
- A list of roles seen so far, so you can see what's been posted and taken down
- Support for feeds and forwarded email alerts, for sites that limit automated visits
ChangeGist has a Job hunter starter pack that sets up three careers pages in one go, each with an alert rule already filled in.
Sites that limit automated visits
Some big job boards don't allow automated checking. Respect that. There are honest ways round it that don't involve pretending to be a person: follow the board's own feed, forward its email alerts to your monitoring service, or have the service check from your own browser while you're signed in.
Keep the alerts worth reading
A few habits make the difference between alerts you act on and alerts you archive:
- Write one clear rule per page, like “a new marketing role is posted”
- Turn on phone notifications for the companies you care about most
- Remove companies you've gone off, so the rest stand out
- Apply quickly: early applicants are often read first