How to unlock hidden hidden remote jobs with Google
Learn this easy-to-use trick to find remote jobs others just won't see
NoCommute is a free daily newsletter with just-posted remote jobs. It’s become the go-to resource for thousands of subscribers to find their next remote job. Each issue of NoCommute has hundreds of just-posted remote roles, and many of them can’t be found on popular job boards like Indeed or LinkedIn.
In this post, we’ll share the secret to how we find those just-posted roles that are hidden from most remote job seekers.
The challenge - Job boards don’t show all the remote jobs
In the July 13 edition of NoCommute, we found a HR Shared Services Coordinator remote job at Zendesk.
But when you search for a HR Shared Services Coordinator on Indeed, this remote role isn’t returned.
Unfortunately, the job isn’t on LinkedIn either.
So if you’re searching on Indeed or LinkedIn for a remote HR Shared Services Coordinator position (and you don’t subscribe to NoCommute), you’ll miss out on this perfect fit!
How Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) figure into the search
If you’ve ever submitted an application to a job online before, you’re surely familiar with applicant tracking systems (ATS). An ATS is used by organizations to open job requisitions, collect resumes, screen submissions, and move candidates through the hiring process.
For many organizations, it’s also the tool they use to power the career section of their website and advertise open positions to job seekers. Most organizations leverage the web hosting provided by their ATS instead of using their own corporate website. For example, the URL for Zendesk’s website is https://www.zendesk.com.
But let’s take a look at the URL for the remote HR Shared Services Coordinator we looked at before.
You can see that this job opening is not on Zendesk’s corporate website - instead, it’s posted on a site hosted by Workday, one of the most popular applicant tracking systems. Workday keeps a common URL structure for all of their customers, which is:
https://companyname.wd#.myworkdayjobs.com
If this is a little confusing, don’t worry. This structure is the secret sauce and we’ll show you exactly how to leverage it later.
Most organizations use one of these applicant tracking systems:
Workday
Greenhouse
Lever
Jobvite
Taleo
BambooHR
Each one of these sites has a distinct URL that hosts open positions (including remote ones) for their customers. More on this later!
Using advanced Google search techniques to find remote jobs
When using Google to search for a term, it searches the entire internet for that term. But did you know that you can limit your search terms to specific websites? This tool is called a Site Search Operator, and it’s simple to use.
When you go to Google, simply start your search query with site:example.com followed by your search query.
Let’s look at an example. Here, we search for LeBron James on Google, and see results from all over the internet.
But let’s say we want to limit those search results to just content from ESPN.com. We simply add a site operator and re-run the search.
As you can see, all of the results are limited to LeBron James content on ESPN’s website.
The great news is that we can leverage this tactic to find hidden remote jobs. In the previous section, we outlined the most popular applicant tracking systems. As also mentioned previously, each of those application tracking systems has a common domain for hosting all of their customers open roles. Those domains are:
Workday: https://myworkdayjobs.com
Greenhouse: https://boards.greenhouse.io
Lever: https://jobs.lever.co
Jobvite: https://jobs.jobvite.com
Taleo: https://taleo.net/
BambooHR: https://bamboohr.com
Unlock hidden remote jobs with site operators on Google
Now that we know the domains for the most popular applicant tracking systems and how to use site operators to search specific domains, we can combine that knowledge to find remote jobs that are hidden on the most popular job boards.
Let’s use our new knowledge to search for remote HR Shared Services Coordinator jobs and see what we find:
As you can see, we used a site operator to search the myworkdayjobs.com domain, which hosts all of the open jobs for Workday customers. We then searched for the term HR Shared Services Coordinator and added remote to the search query. As you can see, the position at Zendesk was the top result, unlocking a previously hidden remote job.
Customize your remote job search across applicant tracking systems
Of course, this tactic isn’t limited to searching for HR Shared Services Coordinator jobs just on Workday. To find the right role for you, enter this into the Google search box:
site:ATS URL + job title + remote
So if you’d like to search for remote Account Executive jobs on the Greenhouse ATS, you’d enter:
site:boards.greenhouse.io "account executive" remote
(See it on Google)
To search for remote Software Engineer jobs on the Lever ATS, you’d enter:
site:jobs.lever.co "software engineer" remote
(See it on Google)
To search for Customer Success jobs on the Jobvite ATS, you’d enter:
site:jobs.jobvite.com "customer success" remote
(See it on Google)
Customize your searches based on the type of position you’re searching for and the applicant tracking system sites you want to search. By adding the word “remote” to our search, we ensure that all of the returned postings have the word “remote” in them. In addition to “remote,” you may also want to do additional searches with the phrases “virtual” or “work from anywhere” to find other remote jobs.
Bonus tip: Want to find just the latest jobs? On the search results page, click on “Tools” in the top right corner, click on the “Any time” drop down, and select a date range.
Doesn’t this create a lot of Google searching to find the remote job for me?
The short answer: yes. Each applicant tracking system requires its own search, and there are some that we didn’t even mention in this post. This means you’ll need to go Google regularly and complete a search for each specific site. While this is an extremely effective technique to find hidden remote jobs, it can become tedious.
How can I automate these remote job searches?
The good news is that NoCommute has been using this tactic to find hidden remote jobs for years. We’ve discovered nearly 1,000 companies hiring remote workers and track their new remote job openings. Those new openings are published in a daily newsletter, automating this job search process for remote job seekers.
Sign up for NoCommute here.