JobofinderUpdated 11 October 2026
Why alerts get ignored
Most people set up a job alert in a hurry: one broad word, a whole country, every day. The first email has ninety jobs in it, eighty of them irrelevant. By the second week it goes unread, and the one advert that mattered is somewhere in the middle.
A good alert is short. It should be possible to read all of it in the time it takes to drink a coffee.
Five settings that matter
1. The job title, the way employers write it
Search for the title as it appears in adverts, not as you would describe the work. If you are not sure, look at ten real adverts for the job you want and note the titles. In Jobofinder a job matches when its title contains all the words of one of your entries, so "sales assistant" finds "Part-time Sales Assistant" and "Sales Assistant (Weekends)". Similar titles are matched too, such as "software engineer" when you asked for "software developer".
If you do not know the title at all, use a ready-made search such as every part-time job near you.
2. The words you never want
Leaving words out is the quickest way to shorten a list. Common ones: senior, manager, lead, driver, intern, volunteer. If a kind of advert annoys you twice, exclude a word from it.
3. The country and the town
Choose the country, so that jobs from elsewhere are left out, and type your town. A search with no place is a search of everything.
4. How far you can really travel
Be honest about this. A job fifty kilometres away that you would never commute to is noise. In Jobofinder you choose only the town, or up to 5, 10, 25, 50 or 100 kilometres from it.
5. When it arrives
An alert that interrupts you all day trains you to dismiss it. Twice a day is enough for almost every job-board advert. Jobofinder gathers the jobs you have to apply to yourself into a morning and an evening round-up, at times you choose, in your own time zone. The things that cannot wait, such as a captcha on an application in progress or a vacancy you are watching, still reach you at once.
Check it before you rely on it
Look at what the alert finds today. If the list contains jobs you would never apply for, tighten it. If it is empty, loosen it. In Jobofinder the "Show matching jobs" button does this before the search starts, and afterwards each search has a line called "Where it looked" that shows how many adverts were read, how many matched, and which titles came close.
Alerts and applying are different things
An alert tells you. For most job-board adverts that is the right amount of help: you read it and decide. For the employers you most want to work for, telling is not fast enough. Add their careers pages to the same search and, where the form is one it can fill in, Jobofinder sends your application when a matching job appears. For a single vacancy you are waiting for, use a vacancy watch.
Common questions
How many job alerts should I have?
As few as cover what you want. One alert per kind of job is easier to keep reading than six overlapping ones that send you the same advert from different sites.
My alert sends nothing. What is wrong?
Usually the job title is too exact or the area too small. Try the shorter form of the title ("warehouse" instead of "warehouse operative nights"), widen the distance, and check whether any jobs were left out because of the place. In Jobofinder, "Where it looked" under each search shows the titles that came close.