Popular Canadian Gateways | Using Search Engines to Find Jobs
Using the Right Key Words

A Gateway site is a collection of information, grouped by subject, that will be of interest to a particular target group. Gateway sites or megasites often choose, organize and evaluate Internet resources for you. Many of these sites have their own search engine that searches only the contents of that web site. Oxford County Library's Find a Job page and its subsequent links form an employment gateway for Oxford County residents.

Other Gateways
Campus WorkLink & National Graduate Registry (NGR) 

Online job-search and campus recruitment database, for job seekers and employers (from Industry Canada)

Electronic Labour Exchange (ELE) 

Electronic employment service that matches people and work based on skills, education, and experience (from Human Resources Development Canada)

Worksearch

Designed to help Canadians search for work on-line and develop effective work search strategies (from Human Resources Development Canada)

Youth Opportunities  

The Ontario Government's Youth Employment Initiative

MazeMaster 

An HRDC sponsored site promoting Youth Employment

Canada WorkInfoNet (HRDC) 

A searchable directory of Internet links to hundreds of other sites which offer services and information about the job search process

Career Owl

Career Owl is an Internet Recruiting Information Service (IRI) which provides employment listings from across Canada, and which matches the user's resume to the available jobs

Canada Site - Jobs and Employment The Government of Canada website provides links to the many federally offered employment programs and opportunities

Using Search Engines to Find Jobs

It is difficult to use general search engines to find jobs.
You can successfully find Web pages which will give you career information and tell you which are some of the major companies in your area. However, to find actual job postings is more difficult and time-consuming. Your best strategy for finding job postings is to use gateway sites such as Career Bookmarks or a specialized search engine such as Job-search-engine.com.

• Search engines work best for high tech jobs. Be specific - computer language, application.
• If you are using a general purpose search engine, you must specify that you are searching for a job by including a word such as job or employment.
• Use your job location as a search term: "Oxford County" or Ontario.
• Use quotation marks to show phrases such as "call centre" or "software engineer".
• Try both British and American spellings joined by the word or, e.g. centre or center.
• If you are not getting good results, change your keywords.
• If you are still not getting good results, change your search engine. (The Oxford County Library has compiled a list of the more popular Search Engines here.
• Check your spelling and capitalization.
• Click on the "help" button found on the home page of most search engines. This will give you the rules for searching with that search engine.
• Some search engines use an asterisk (*) as a truncation symbol to search for words with multiple endings, for example employ* will search for employer, employers, employee, employees, employment, employability. (Some search engines will do this automatically and some will search for the singular and plural forms of a word automatically. The Help section will tell you what your search engine will do.)
• Caution: the job postings may be outdated. The date modified given by some search engines does not tell you when the job was listed or when it expires.

Tips on Using Selected Search Engines to Find Job Postings

Job-Search-Engine.com	Altavista Canada	MetaCrawler
This metasearch engine searches up to ten job posting sites at once. As well as saving time, it is a good way to see which general job posting sites are best for your particular job search. However, your search results will be more limited if you are looking for a Canadian job. Use the Advanced Job Search to select its best Web sites for Canadian jobs.	This is the Canadian version of Altavista, one of the most comprehensive search engines on the web. Altavista is best suited to very specific searches and you can improve your search by using unique or unusual words. Altavista recognizes quotation marks to show phrases, and + to indicate that the word must be included and - to indicate that the word must not be included. Because it is a general Canadian search engine, you must specify that you are looking for a job opening by including search terms such as job or employment or "job opening".	This metasearch engine harnesses the searching power of ten search engines, including Altavista, Excite and Yahoo. Because this is a general search engine, you must include a term such as job or employment or "job opening" in your search string. Although all search engines do not recognize special search syntax such as + (meaning must include), use them for best results.

Below are examples of how to enter your keywords for each search engine to get information about jobs Effective use of keywords in search engines or on gateway sites is crucial to finding the right jobs or information you're looking for.

Job-Search-Engine.com	Altavista Canada and Metacrawler
Select province or state. Select a button for And or Or to combine search terms. However, although you can put a city as a keyword, not all job search sites support this. accountant or auditor The results will have either words accountant or auditor Cobol and C The results will have both words Cobol and C.	"call center" "call centre" The results will have either phrase call center or call centre. +"job posting" +Cobol +Ontario The results will have all words, job posting, Cobol, Ontario +job +Ontario -programming The results will have both words job and Ontario but will not include any that have the word programming.

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