Where to Find Entry-Level Jobs (Best Sites & Strategies)

TL;DR — Use job boards to discover roles, but apply on the company's own careers page whenever you can — that's where applications get seen fastest. Build a small stack: one early-career board (Handshake), one big board for reach, one niche board for your field. Set narrow daily alerts so you apply while listings are fresh, tailor each resume to the posting's exact words, and skip stale or pay-to-apply listings so your effort lands on real openings.

The hardest part of a first job search usually isn't writing the resume — it's figuring out where to even look so your applications don't vanish. There are thousands of job sites, and most "apply to 200 jobs" advice just sends you faster into a void. The better move is a small, deliberate set of places to look, a habit for catching new postings early, and a rule for where you actually click "submit." This guide lays out all three.

Where to start: a three-board stack

You don't need ten job boards. You need a few that each do a different job. A good early-career stack is one student/new-grad board, one large board for reach, and one niche board for your field.

• Start with Handshake if you're a student or recent grad. Most U.S. colleges partner with it, and it's built specifically for early-career hiring — employers post there because they want to hire students and new grads, which is not true of the open internet. You sign in with your school email, fill out your profile, and get matched to roles, internships, and on-campus recruiting. MIT's career office and most university career centers treat it as the default first stop. If you've already graduated, many schools keep alumni access alive — check before you assume it's closed to you.
• Add one large board for reach — Indeed or LinkedIn. These have the most listings and the best alert tooling, which matters more than which one you pick. LinkedIn doubles as the place recruiters look you up, so a complete profile there pulls double duty.
• Add one niche board that matches your field. Niche boards tend to carry fewer but more relevant listings: Idealist for nonprofits and social impact, Dice or Wellfound for tech and startups, USAJOBS for federal roles, plus field-specific boards your professors or department will know. A focused board often beats a giant one because you're not filtering out 95% of the results.

A note on aggregators and AI-written "best boards" lists: some niche boards repost the same listings the big boards already carry, so don't mistake a longer list of tabs for a better search. Two or three places you actually check daily beats ten you check never.

Job boards vs. company career pages: where to actually apply

This is the highest-leverage habit in this whole guide, so it gets its own section.

Use the board to find the job. Apply on the company's own careers page when you can. When you apply directly on an employer's site, your application drops straight into the applicant-tracking system that their recruiters are logged into all day. Some job-board "apply" flows route into a separate database that a recruiter has to go check separately — and sometimes never does. The pattern shows up in the aggregate hiring data, too: job boards generate the large majority of applicants but a much smaller share of actual hires, while company career pages convert at a far higher rate (CareerPlug's recruiting-metrics benchmark is one widely cited source for this gap).

So the move is:

1. Spot the role on a board.
2. Open the company's careers page in a new tab and search the same title.
3. Apply there if it exists; fall back to the board only if it doesn't.

The exception: when a board offers a genuine one-click "Easy Apply" and there's no direct posting, using it is fine — an application sent beats a perfect one you never finished. The point isn't to make every application a project; it's to take the direct route on the roles you actually care about.

How to set up job alerts that actually work

Most of the "application black hole" is timing. The first applications a recruiter sees fill the shortlist, so a posting you find a week late is a posting you're already behind on. Alerts fix this — if you set them tightly.

• Make each alert specific, not broad. "Jobs" returns noise; "junior data analyst, remote" or "marketing coordinator, Chicago" returns a list worth reading. Combine a title with a location or "remote." On LinkedIn and Indeed, you save a search and toggle the alert on; both let you choose email, app notification, or both.
• Run a few narrow alerts, not one wide one. Three alerts for three specific titles will surface better matches than a single vague catch-all. LinkedIn lets you keep around 20 saved alerts at once, so there's room.
• Choose daily for competitive roles. For entry-level and new-grad postings, which fill fast, daily beats weekly — you want to be early. Check them each morning and apply to the genuine matches the same day.
• Prune after a week. Delete any alert returning zero or irrelevant results and tighten the wording on the rest. Treat the search terms as something you tune, not set once.

How to filter by location and remote

Two filters cause most of the confusion, so set them deliberately:

• "Remote" is the noisiest filter on every board. A posting labeled remote may still be remote-within-a-state, hybrid, or US-only. Read the body, not just the tag, before you invest time. If you need fully remote, search the word "remote" and skim for a location requirement buried in the description.
• Set a realistic radius for in-person roles. Picking your exact city only can hide good roles one town over; opening it to the whole country drowns you. A commute-sized radius is usually right.
• Watch for "USA"-only or country-only listings. Some postings list only a country with no city, which makes location filters unreliable — judge those by the description rather than the tag.

How to avoid the application black hole

"I applied to 80 jobs and heard nothing" almost always comes down to two fixable things, not bad luck.

1. A real share of postings were never going to hire you. Some listings are stale, duplicated across boards, or never actively being filled. Pouring applications into them feels productive and changes nothing. Learning to spot and skip them is its own skill — our guide to ghost jobs and scams covers the tells (open for many months, vague descriptions, reposted identical text) and the hard line that defeats scams: money should only ever flow to you.

2. Your resume didn't match the posting's language. Most applications are filtered by software, and increasingly by AI, before a person reads them — and the filter checks your resume against the exact words in the job description. If the posting says "data analysis" and your resume says "worked with numbers," you may never surface. So tailor each application: pull the key skills and tools from the posting and echo that wording where it's genuinely true for you. Our guide on resume keywords and ATS walks through doing this without keyword-stuffing, and the Tailor Resume tool automates the tedious per-job version of it.

The deeper fix is to stop treating volume as the strategy. A smaller number of targeted, directly-submitted, tailored applications beats a firehose of generic ones — which is the whole argument of the broader job search strategy guide.

A worked routine for one week

Here's what an effective, non-exhausting week actually looks like:

ONCE (setup, ~30 min)
- Handshake profile complete + 1 niche board bookmarked
- 3 narrow alerts saved (specific title + location/remote), daily email on

EACH MORNING (~20 min)
- Skim alert emails
- For each real match: open the company careers page, apply there
- Tailor the resume to that posting's top skills before submitting
- Log it (company, role, date, link) in a simple sheet

ONCE A WEEK (~15 min)
- Delete dead alerts, tighten the wording on the rest
- Follow up on anything from 7+ days ago with no reply

That's a few focused hours a week, aimed at real openings, applied to through the front door, with a resume that matches each posting. It will out-perform hundreds of scattershot clicks — and it's a lot less demoralizing.

A first job search is partly a numbers game, but it's the quality of the numbers that moves the needle: the right handful of places to look, the discipline to apply where applications actually get read, and a resume tuned to each role. Get those right and the void starts answering back.

Sources

• MIT Career Advising & Professional Development — Handshake 101: What it is & how to use it
• CareerPlug — Recruiting metrics and KPIs benchmark
• LinkedIn Help — Manage job alerts
• Indeed — Starting, stopping, and managing job alerts
• USAJOBS — Federal jobs (always free to apply)