The problem with JobMine was not its search capabilities, so I am disappointed to see how much they have changed as we start using WaterlooWorks. When approaching applying for jobs on WaterlooWorks for the first time, it appeared as if there were some handy functions there. You can quickly search by keyword or location, and there’s a handy number of quick searches including one titled “for my program”.
Do not be fooled. This search will not give you a concise list of jobs that have duties related to your program. For instance, if I use the “for my program” search function I get anything from Maintenance Assistant to Building Administrative.
Now I understand that some first years have to settle for jobs that are not the best, but these should not be the ones that show up in their “for my program” quick search. And I cannot figure out what search parameter are used for this quick search. Some of the jobs that come up don’t even have Mechanical Engineering, or General Engineering listed under ‘targeted clusters’.
What I am trying to get at is that the “for my program” spits out far too many unrelated jobs that can make it difficult to locate jobs actually related to one’s program of study.
In order to narrow down the number of jobs that come up in a search and actually find what you are looking for there are some things that you can do.
First you can search by “Program Clusters”. This narrows the jobs somewhat, but is not the best for getting rid of the jobs that are not related to your program of study. You can also search by “Individual Programs”, but this does not appear to have much effect on the jobs that appear.
The parameter that I have found to be the most effective at narrowing down based on area of study is “Job Category”. These search options do not exactly line up with offered programs, but when used will give one more specific results from what they searched. I mention that it does not list the options like programs because it is missing some programs. One can still narrow their search by selecting similar job categories or lumped categories. This is the filter I used to narrow my job search from upwards of 800 jobs to around 150 jobs.
WaterlooWorks has more options for searching for jobs by location. Now, you cannot only search by region, but by province, state, or country. Also, if you are dead set on working in a specific city in a country on the other side of the world, you can type in the city’s name in the first location option.
Other useful search parameter are, of course, searching by level (junior, intermediate, senior), work duration (four months, eight months), transportation and housing. Although transportation and housing’s search function does not seem to work that well. What would work better would be a drop down for “Additional Information” that had the options that employers are choosing.
The last parameter that I want to bring up is one that will be most useful during the continuous round. The application deadline option will be useful for doing just what you have time for in between your studies. Don’t waste time writing a cover letter for a job that is closing two weeks from now, when there is another job you are interested in closing today. There is also a couple quick searches that work this way as well. One has jobs with the application deadline that day, and the other has jobs with application deadlines in the next ten days.
Overall the search function works okay, but the website in general is not very reader friendly. You have to scroll to the right in order to see all of the information on the search results page. I also find the actual job posting information hard to glance over quickly. I feel like all of the most important information that I need to see first to weed out the jobs that I definitely can’t apply to are no longer grouped together like they were on JobMine.
And you can’t turn WaterlooWorks into a verb like you can JobMine. “I’m going to WaterlooWork…” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
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