Should I stop applying on LinkedIn and use other job boards?
Not if you are applying to a larger company. Every board feeds into the same applicant tracking system there, so a quieter board puts you in the same pile through a different way in. At a smaller organisation it can be worth it, because many of them never advertise on LinkedIn at all.
The interesting part is what does make a difference once you are in that pile.
Why do smaller companies use other job boards?
Advertising a role on LinkedIn costs money, and not every organisation can afford it. Some have the budget and still choose to stay away. They would rather post on a niche board with a specialised audience than pay and hope for volume.
That cuts in the candidate's favour. If a company is not on LinkedIn, the niche board is not an alternative route, it is the only route. The audience there is smaller and closer to the profile the company wants, which is exactly why they chose it.
What happens when I apply to a large company through several boards?
Larger organisations run an applicant tracking system that collects candidates from every board and source into one place. Whether you applied on LinkedIn, a paid board, a free one or the careers page, you end up in the same system, read by the same recruiter.
When the same person applies through several channels, one of two things happens. The recruiter receives a separate notification from each board, or the system spots the duplicate from your email address, phone number or details on the CV and merges it. A modern system does this so smoothly that nobody notices.
It is a bit like posting the same letter through the front door and the back door: it still ends up on the same kitchen table. There is no penalty for it, although I will admit that seeing five applications from one person in a short space of time is not exciting. The board you used never decides whether you get the interview. The CV does.
What did I get wrong about LinkedIn?
Back in the day I believed LinkedIn was the superior board. Later, like many others, I started trying the alternatives, paid and free. None of them changed my results, because the CV was what got me interviews, not the place I sent it from.
The “LinkedIn is overcrowded” advice misses this. Moving to a quieter board feels like action, but at a large company you are joining the same queue by a different way in. Tailoring the CV and using a template a recruiter can read in seconds does more than any board, which I went into in Why doesn't my CV get me to the interview?
What a CV has to prove before anyone reads further is a chapter of its own in Not in the Room, together with the heatmap of where a recruiter's eye actually goes in the first seconds.
Does following up on my application actually help?
Against volume, a follow-up is one of the few things that gives you a second chance. I have always opened a candidate's email when they made the effort to follow up or push back. Most of them are a promise to give it everything, and I empathise with that.
In most cases, though, that candidate still comes short of the people already on the shortlist. But recruiters make mistakes, and a follow-up is how some of them get caught. The screening phase rewards not the best candidate, but the one who knows the game and its rules. It is the same mechanism behind why a candidate's message makes a recruiter look again sooner, which I described in Why is the agency recruiter chasing me daily while the internal recruiter takes a week to reply?
So when should I send it, and to whom?
The timing of a follow-up matters more than its wording. A recruiter's first hours of the day usually go on clearing the inbox, so a message arriving in the middle of that gets skimmed or buried. Sent afterwards, it lands in an inbox that has just been cleared, and it has a better chance to stand out or get a yes.
This is my own logic rather than a rule I can vouch for across every recruiter: if someone starts at 08:00, the distractions are usually gone by 10:00. Habits differ, but the principle holds. Do not arrive in the rush.
For the address, start with the recruiter named on the ad. If there is none, look at the company's staff on LinkedIn for a recruiter, talent acquisition or HR title. Failing that, the shared inboxes on the company's own domain, the careers@ or hr@ kind, usually reach someone.
As candidates, how often do we spend an evening hunting for a quieter job board, and no time at all finding the person who will read the application?
Any board gets you into the pile. Timing gets you out of it.
Want the rules I give an AI tool before it touches a CV?
The free CV pack has them, with two prompts, a clean template that any applicant tracking system can read, and worked examples for five fields. It takes about an hour to set up once, and around fifteen minutes per application after that.
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