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BOSTON.COM JOBS > HELP > SEARCH TIPS

More tips for finding a job on BostonWorks

Find a job, your own way.

• Pick a category. You can browse jobs by industry, job title, employer, location (region or town), and by commute.
• Use a keyword. Search by keyword within any of the above pages. For example, "teach*" within the 495 commute page.
• Get specific. And of course, you can also use our advanced search form.
• Ready, set, apply. Find something you like? You can either click on the apply button on the listing or contact the company yourself, through the information listed in the description. Listed below are more details on applying.

How do I get better search results?

• Keep it broad. Begin your search as broadly as possible and narrow it down as you go. Select as few options as possible on the first search. You might try beginning with one or two broad keywords. For instance, instead of 'Quality Assurance, software, testing, manager', begin with 'software, manager'. You may wish to choose to search Job Descriptions instead of Job Titles or leave the city and radius blank
• Narrow it down. When you get an idea of the range of results, narrow your results down by running the search again in a certain city or with an additional keyword or an additional option selected. Add options one by one until you end up with the best set of results.
• Change the wording. When searching for commonly abbreviated terms, try searching for both the abbreviation and the spelled out term - for instance, 'HR' and 'Human Resources.’ Try leaving out special characters and punctuation
• Keep it together. If you are searching for a group of words or a phrase it is best to put all words in that group or phrase between quotes or select the radio button for Match: All Words.
• More tips: If you select to match "Any Words" only one category should be selected. If you attempt to select more than one category while searching "Any words" you will receive a message "If you would like to search with multiple categories, please select "All Words" instead of "Any Words" for your keyword search." Only the first category selected will remain selected once you select the "ok" button on the alert message box. You will not be prevented from performing a search with multiple categories, but you will receive the message the first time you attempt to do so.
• If you are using categories for your job search, often times the results can vary since categories are an attempt to classify jobs together by job function, example: accounting/finance. You might have better results not selecting a category and using only key words and location.

You can also refer to Search Help which offers good suggestions on how to use the Job Search. From your search results page you will see the following buttons:

Click on the Search Help button.

The information below will assist you in modifying your search to return the best results possible.

Example 1:

Search Keywords:
sales quota (cold call,revenue,presidents club)

The above example would bring back results with the first two words in them, as well as at least ONE of the words in parentheses. Make sure to select 'all words' on the resume database search page.

*NOTE: When putting words in parentheses: - No spaces after commas
- No quotation marks if there are two words between the commas

Example 2:

Search Keywords: (cold call,revenue,award,sales,quota) (harvard,yale,princeton,dartmouth)
(IBM,GE,computer sciences corporation,fidelity investments)

The above example would give you results that include at least one of the words within each parenthesis subset.

*NOTE: When putting words in parentheses:
- No spaces after commas
- No quotation marks if there are two words between the commas

Example 3:

Search Keywords: sales revenue "cold call" award -telemarketing

The above example would give you results that include all words EXCEPT 'telemarketing' as we put a minus sign before that word (no space between minus sign and the word telemarketing). Again, select 'all words' on search page. To exclude multiple words you would need to follow the example below.

sales revenue award .(telemarketing,cold call,quota)

The above example would give you results that include all words EXCEPT 'telemarketing', .cold call. and .quota. as we put a minus sign before that word (no space between minus sign and the parentheses). Again, select 'all words' on search page.

*NOTE: When putting words in parentheses: - No spaces after commas
- No quotation marks if there are two words between the commas

Additional Tip: To maximize search results, include all variations of root words in your keyword search string:

Strategy - Strategic
Accountant - Accounting
Marketer - Marketing - Market

How does relevancy ranking work?
When running a job search the default search result is to order the results most relevant to least relevant.

• Relevancy is determined based on terms entered into the search.
• Those terms are weighted based on the frequency that they appear in all the jobs in the database.
• Infrequently used words have a higher weight than frequently used words causing jobs that match the infrequently used word to have a higher relevancy.

An example of this would be an "any word" keyword search for "nanotechnology analyst."

The jobs with the word "nanotechnology" would be returned first, because that word has a higher ranking than "analyst". Because this was run as an "any word" search, jobs with just the word "analyst" would follow the nanotechnology jobs.

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