Search Strategies Part 4: Listings & Job Boards

2026 Update: Careerlink is now Handshake! And the info formerly found on Canvas is now our website, where you will find these additional job boards: 

• The Rome Group 
• Work for Good 
• 80,000 Hours 
• Idealist  
• Impact Pool
• Green Jobs  
• Environmental Defense Fund's Green Jobs Hub

When you imagine yourself searching for a job or internship, you likely see yourself scrolling through listings on a job board, but surprise! This isn't the most effective use of your limited time. You should be selective about the job boards and limit the amount of time you spend on them. We'll tell you more in the final episode of our series on internship and job search strategies. 

Some resources mentioned in this episode:

• Jobs that are Left (as in left-leaning)
• GOP Jobs in the House
• Tom Manatos Jobs
• Dome Watch
• Global Jobs
• DevEx
• ReliefWeb

Transcript

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Hello everyone. This is Amber Brown and Ahmar Ursani.

We are both GPSI career coaches, and we're here to provide a few updates and a refresh on our existing podcast series.

So some of our episodes use our old community name, but we want to clarify that our new community name is Government Policy and Social Impact.

Or you can just say GPSI, for short.

We want to highlight our updated career engagement model as well in this episode because it helps us contextualize the work we do.

So I'm going to give you a brief overview of the stages, and you can see more in the show notes.

So it starts with understanding yourself, which is super important for reflection and visioning possibilities,

preparing to the actual search and apply process.

And then finally when you're actually engaging in your opportunity.

So you may also hear in some of our older podcast episodes, a reference to what's called a live chat.

And we wanted to make sure you noted that it's no longer in existence, but instead we have a different resource,

which we have various in-person drop in hours that we had that are GPS specific throughout the week.

And there was also a time that you can meet our career peers. Um, available Monday through Friday for on demand support.

Additionally, we no longer use canvas. All the resources have migrated to our GPS website.

A link again will be provided in the show notes. And our last technology update is we want to discuss Career link.

It's now handshake. So in handshake it's our one stop shop for career related events job and um, job and internship postings.

You can schedule your appointments there and more. And to close, we want to state that our annual Career expo now has a GPS specific focus day,

where employers from our industry come to you to discuss career options.

This, along with our annual Changemaker Summit, which brings local nonprofits to campus, helps you see how you can make an impact on our world.

So thank you so much for listening to this. If you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out to anyone on our team.

Hope you're having a good day. See you. Yeah. Thank you.

Welcome to the GPP podcast for budding politicos, policy wonks and advocates.

I'm Amy Heath Carpentier, and I'm Susan Craig.

As career counselors in Washington University's Career Center and co-directors of the Government and Policy Work Group.

We walk alongside burgeoning policy wonks, politicos and change agents as they chart their paths to change the world.

This podcast is for you if you're interested in hearing tips and techniques that will position you to find your place in the fast moving,

mission driven world of politics, policy and advocacy.

So, Susan, we're in the final episode of our internship search strategy series.

We've been hearing from many students about their searches over the last two weeks,

and we hope they're taking advantage of these podcasts and getting ready to go.

So we're going to end our series today talking about listings and job boards.

So as a reminder, each episode in this series builds on those before.

So if you haven't listened to episodes one through three, we recommend you do so before you listen to this one.

Now to get started.

Susan, if I were to say that you were going to spend the next hour on your internship search, what would you envision yourself doing?

Scrolling through internship listings on the job board. In fact,

most students envision the search process as a combination of churning through

listings and then writing and submitting endless cover letters and resumes.

But hopefully, we've shown you that there's a more fruitful way to search in this series,

one that's much more generative and less soul crushing than scrolling through listings.

Plus, only about 25% 25% of potential listings ever make it to a job board, particularly in the case of internships.

So let's help you get savvy about how you're going to use your listings and job boards.

So let's start with what listings and job boards are. Just in case you're unclear.

And then we'll talk a little bit about how an internship listing comes into being, give you a sort of behind the scenes.

First, a listing is simply an advertisement for an open position at an organization.

In most cases, a listing provides a summary about the employer, some details about the tasks the intern will perform,

and a list of qualifications to they're seeking in their most qualified applicants.

In the vast majority of cases, the hiring manager will write the listing with the human resources professional skilled at finding interns.

Sometimes they're known as recruiters or internship program coordinators.

The recruiter will place the position on the employer's careers page, usually found on their website under About Us or on a careers tab.

Finally, the employers HR person will decide whether to list the position on what is called a job board.

So a job board is a place where they will post jobs, internships, any kind of opportunities.

Normally, an employer will subscribe or have a certain select group of job boards they regularly use.

You may know some of these. Indeed, idealist are some of the most well known, but many job and internship websites charge employers to post listings,

or they'll charge the applicants for access to the listings for internships.

Employers also often turn to universities in their vicinity,

or from places where they've had successful relationships or had successful recruits prior,

and they contact the career center at the university and asked that their

internships be placed on an internal board for the students at the university.

So in our case, that's career link, and at Washu, we have a great employer relations team that follows trends and student interests

that are generated based on the profiles that you fill out and career link,

and then they develop relationships with employers based on those trends.

And in fact,

our employer relations colleagues are collaborating with recruiters right now to get their internships up and posted on career link for you.

And then sometimes those employers will come to campus or or have a virtual event where they can promote those positions.

And these are the employer information sessions that you might hear about promoted through career center emails.

Now, in government policy and advocacy, this process differs quite a bit.

So many employers, they don't need to do all this work.

They receive more qualified applicants than they need just through a posting on their website alone.

So they don't need to use they don't need to pay to go on to a job board or even go to the effort to to reach out to a university.

Prominent think tanks can get thousands of applicants just for one research assistant position.

Now, we don't tell you that to freak you out. We're just letting you know that if you've listened to the previous episodes on targeting,

you know that there's a lot of ways for you to be in the top of that stack just based on your legwork that you do to get there.

So, as you can tell, applying for internships is nothing like applying to colleges.

It's much more disorganized. So let's chat about how you could use these boards.

Amy, what are some tips that you have for using the job boards wisely?

Well, the first thing is you need to be selective. Your time is finite.

Choose well. Consider how many applicants are using an individual job board, for example.

Indeed, which seems to be pretty popular with students right now, is open to anyone and everyone.

It covers many fields, and if you're going to be competing with more,

you're going to be competing with more people just to get noticed through a position on indeed,

smaller, more niche job boards are the gems of the GPP search.

Career link is a great resource for Washu students, because most of the positions listed have been curated by our employer relations team,

and many have been sent to us by alum or recruiters that love Washu.

The Government and Public Policy weekly newsletter is similar.

Generations of GPP alums send us internships and jobs, and they also advise us on the job boards that are hot right now in the field.

So some of our favorite job boards are listed on the canvas website for the Government and Public Policy workgroup, but examples of more niche boards.

Let's talk about those. Susan, what are some of the ones that we like? Yeah.

So I like one that's called Tom Manatee, which is a board that has lots of Hill related jobs.

So anything. I mean, there are positions on the Hill specifically,

but there's also positions that are located like kind of advocacy jobs or lobbying firms or or firms that are kind of hill oriented.

So that's a good place to start. I like global jobs and DevOps.

So let me talk about each of those. Global jobs is free for students which and an alum, which is great.

Um, they have all kinds of jobs and they're all over the world. So that's helpful.

If you're an international student or you have dual citizenship or you're abroad, you're going to be abroad in the future.

That might be a good one for you. Dev X is a hub for international development and relief efforts.

So for the organizations that USAID and other development bodies of governments

work with to provide international aid and development and their website,

Dev provides not only a job board, but a lot of great insider tips on entering that field.

Now, global jobs is free dev I think has a small fee.

At some point they have different graded tiers of membership.

The other one I love is jobs that are left left, not left over, but left leaning.

Um, their jobs that are that are left is a Google group.

So it's free, which is lovely. Uh, all kinds of great decisions there.

There was a Google group called jobs that are right, but it has not been active as of late,

and I am still looking to find an option for for our Republican students.

The other left leaning job listing board is Don't Watch, which is more specifically about jobs on the Hill for for folks on the left.

And I also don't think there's a right leaning equivalent, although that may have changed in the last year.

Yeah. So most of the Washu students come in asking for more left leaning.

But if you're someone who is more on the right, we work with you too.

So let us know and we can get you connected to some alum.

Finally, for those of you interested in more philanthropy or nonprofits, an example of a good one for you might be the Journal of Philanthropy.

That is a great option not just for the job and internship search, but also they publish.

What organizations are getting big grants. Yeah.

And you, if you start to follow that, you can see where the money is going and then who might be hiring.

Yeah. So those are always good advice. Money follow them. So let's say like Bill and Melinda Gates is given this amount of money.

Granted this amount of money to this organization to do this. And so then, you know, aha, I can go and look.

So that's a really good little insider tip there. Yeah.

So remember I mean we've just talked a lot about these lists but is I remember it's not meant to be the place where you spend all your time.

It should help you organize your, your target list a little bit and organize your search and and and figure out how you want to spend your time.

But if you can see a listing on the employer's website and just apply directly and quickly through that link,

then your chances are much better than if you apply through a listing.

And if you don't see an internship position listed for a couple of weeks, you can look to see if a wash U student has interned there,

and then either use Success Stories or LinkedIn and just ask them what was their timeline?

When did they apply? What was it like? Make sure you take advantage of those resources that are available to you on campus.

Job boards can also help you target employers.

For example, if you see an employer who sounds interesting on a board, you can add them to your parking lot to evaluate later.

Maybe they'll get added to your target list, but you're not spending the time you allocated to the listings going down.

A radical on the web.

The position says it's for a director, which you're not going to be qualified for, but you're interested to see if they have internships.

Then just pop over to the website and have a look. Maybe they just don't want to pay to advertise for the internship position.

Another little tip on that is, you know, our employer relations staff at the cruise center.

While they don't have a very forward facing job with students every day like Susan and I do.

They're happy to help you. So if you find an employer that you're interested in,

you can actually search career link for the employer and see if they've ever posted with us in the past.

You could email my colleague and the colleague that's most closely aligned with the kind of organization you're interested in,

and if you don't know, just email GPP careers and we'll handle that for you.

Get it to the right person. But And just say, do you know if this organization hires interns or full time for those of you.

Thinking about that.

But the reason for that is that our employer relations team, they don't want to be churning out positions that you're not interested in.

So if you give them feedback on, hey, we're interested in this more than that, then they'll investigate.

They do that for us all the time. Yeah, it's their job and they love to get feedback and advice on on where to look and who to reach out to.

So they're happy to get those sorts of leads. Exactly.

So we will sometimes even say, hey, we're seeing this, you know, organization on target lists a lot.

Or, you know, right now X, Y and Z or really hot items.

Let's try to get some relationships with organizations in those areas.

So, you know, the goal here is just know that we're all on your side working for you in the background.

And you know, look on career link.

Look at these other, you know, think about how these job boards relate to one another, not just how they are on their own.

All of this said, Okay. All this job board background said going to job boards and listings should

not take more than 25 to 30% of the time you spend on your search each week.

Okay, so if you think of it as four hours a week you're going to spend on your search,

you should not spend more than an hour scrolling through job boards, because if you are, you're probably wasting some time.

Targeting a network. Networking are far more effective ways of finding an internship.

And they are proactive. They're exciting. They're they might be hard and struggling, but you're learning.

You're getting a lot back from them.

And it's paying dividends rather than searching through listings, which is very reactive to what is being put out there.

So consider how you're spending your time each week and treat it like a project, which we will talk about in a future podcast.

So until then, keep working to imprint your world.