The pandemic has left many without jobs. Here’s a roundup of the best apps to make job searching right from your phone a piece of cake.
There are tons of job apps out there. Many of them have the same jobs you’ll find on all of the other apps. Trying to figure out which ones to make the most use out of can be quite a daunting task in itself! To qualify for my “best” list, they had to meet just a couple criteria.
They must have an option to filter by salary. Your time is valuable. I don’t know about you, but I don’t just have endless PTO to waste on going to job interviews only to find out at the end that the job could not possibly pay my bills. If I don’t see a posted salary, or even a salary range or ballpark, then chances are, I’m not applying for that job.
I prefer a one-click apply option. Once again, I don’t like to waste my time on unnecessarily complicated tasks when there’s a better way of doing things. Why spend an hour retyping the same information that’s already available in my resume? As any good manager will tell you, work smarter, not harder. And there are much better things you could be doing with that time–such as writing great cover letters to accompany your resume!
And that’s it, really. Simple. So let’s see which apps pass muster!
The Wins
Monster not only allows one-click apply, but they also offer a swipe feature that will be familiar to any Tinder user! Swipe right to apply, swipe left to pass. (Though to be on the safe side and avoid an itchy trigger finger, I prefer to use the buttons, instead.) You can also save jobs to come back to them later. There are great filtering options that allow you to search by job type, commute, and salary. And, best of all, you can select a slider that will hide any jobs with no posted salary. There’s also a spot to put your best professional head shot so you can make a great first impression before ever showing up to the interview.
Indeed lets you sign in with your Google address and have alerts sent to your email for as many job titles as you want. There are great filters, and it even gave me an assessment when I first signed in to show that I was well above average in skills for one of the searches I did. Then it let me post that straight to my profile. You can read user reviews right on the app of the companies you apply for, too. Overall, great stuff from Indeed.
The CareerBuilder Job Search app has the required features, with the added bonus of keeping track of jobs you’ve already applied to. When you’ve filled out application after application, it becomes easy to lose track after a while. With CareerBuilder, it’s all right there in the app.
ZipRecruiter has everything I want. I also like that it allows you to add certificates, associations, websites, and links to your LinkedIn and other social media.
Honorable Mention
Although it doesn’t have an app, I have to give honorable mention to Zippia. There are so many filters to help guide your search that it is a worthy addition here.
The Fails
I initially downloaded these because they turned up in my own searches for the best job apps. They didn’t pass my system, but you may like them, anyway.
Although there’s the ability to filter by salary on Glassdoor, it only allows you to do so in $100k chunks. Not really conducive to a good search. I’m not going to delete it from my phone, however, because the insight into company culture from past and current employees is incredibly valuable.
I should have read more carefully when grabbing a bunch of apps to download. Snagajob is for hourly and “essential” (read: sacrificial) jobs only. The four jobs it immediately suggested for McDonald’s when I opened it should have clued me in. But I didn’t realize it until I saw there was no salary option at all. I also really disliked the “shake to either apply or delete it from your options forever–be careful!” function. Definitely more geared towards high school kids seeking part-time work.
Good&Co is flashy and has pretty colors. It’ll let you take lots of Buzzfeed-style personality quizzes to find out what your spirit animal is in an attempt to match that animal to a company culture. And it’ll let you send spammy messages to your friends inviting them to rate you. But as none of the companies they matched me with were even in my area, it was more of a time-waster than anything. It also kept turning up search results that it admitted were terrible matches for me based on all the tests it had me take.
The Results
Unsurprisingly, but perhaps disappointingly, the old standbys are still your best bets here. While some of the new tech and concepts like matching you to your ideal environment sound cool, they just aren’t there yet. But the big four–Monster, Indeed, CareerBuilder, and ZipRecruiter–are really good at what they do. I recommend downloading any one or even all four of them to get your resume out there. And remember to check out the Glassdoor reviews before deciding if the next place you’re headed is where you really want to be.
These are tough times, so best of luck out there! Hopefully knowing where to begin will make it that much easier to get back on track.
