I Collected Reddit’s Best Job Search Tips and Advice for February 2025

It’s taking unemployed americans more than a year to find a new job, according to a report from last August.

Another report out from Career Group last week agrees, finding that around 20% of job-seekers have been on the hunt for 10 to 12 months or longer.

An NBC news report holds that more than 28% of Americans are searching for new jobs and that this marks the highest rate in a decade.

I spotted all those facts on the “Job Search Hacks” subreddit, one of a handful of the cynical Reddit communities dedicated to sharing tips, tricks, and check-ins from the desolate frontlines of the job search. Some of the advice and insights are clever ways that you can get a foot in the door. Other suggestions, like “lie on your LinkedIn,” are clearly just unethical.

I’ve rounded up the most interesting findings, but don’t think of this article as a to-do guide: I’m not recommending anything here. I’m simply hoping to throw some light on the reality of job-search culture here in 2025, where the sad, sweaty desperation can’t be ignored and gentle aphorisms just aren’t working anymore.

3 Ways to Spot Ghost Jobs

Any veteran of the job search know about ghost jobs, the term describing fake job listings for positions that don’t exist or aren’t actually open.

One of the most popular recent posts on Job Search Hacks summarizes a recent Fortune article on how to sift through these useless job listings:

“Signs of a fake listing: 1. Old or missing timestamps – Most real jobs fill quickly. 2. Repeated postings – The same job appearing too often is suspicious. 3. Not on the company’s website – If it’s only on job boards, it might be fake. To verify, check Glassdoor for warnings, contact the company directly, or network to confirm if the job is real.” -reddit user breakitdown451

Further into the comments, you’ll find a few educated guesses as to why ghost jobs are so common. Some companies forget to pull old listings, while others simply want to appear healthy without actually being healthy. The algorithms of job boards like LinkedIn might prioritize recency, prompting companies to list and relist the same position over and over.

The most cynical guess: It’s to justify the size of the company HR department.

One Job Seeker’s Journey, Charted

One recently-hired employee, Reddit user Stumpy33, charted the results of the 80 job applications that they needed to send out across a three-month period in order to land their new US-based position.

Before you ask, yes: The job was for data analysis.

Some takeaways from the comment include one popular conclusion. Only needing 80 applications to land a job is a nice, low ratio for the modern job seeker. As one commenter put it: “Just 80 applications? Seriously?”

That said, don’t wait up to hear back from any company that you send an application to. Judging from this graph, nearly three quarters of them aren’t likely to get back to you at all.

The 20 Most Popular Job Boards in 2025 So Far

Okay, so we’re only one month into the year, but that’s 30 days of data collected at the Job Search Database, which collates a ton of the many, many job boards out there.

While in most cases, job boards are cannibalizing the same job openings from each other, tracking down a fresh, little-known website can sometimes give a job seeker a bit of an edge in their hunt. If you’re looking for the best job boards, the top one for January 2025 was apparently the work-from-home-focused Remote Rocketship.

Number two was Remote Army and the third place finisher was We Work Remotely, according to the Reddit post from the creator of the Job Search Database. It’s not all remote-only boards – number 20 was for jobs related to outer space – so this is a sign that remote positions are incredibly popular. We at Tech.co have even rounded up our own favorite remote boards in the past.

You can check out all 20 of the recently popular job boards over on the Reddit post in question.

A Job Board That Pulls Listings Directly From Company Sites

Remote jobs are so popular that there’s a subreddit, Remote Job Hunters, dedicated to finding them. There, the top post of all time is from last month, when the creator of a new job board posted about it.

RefereeAI claims to pull job listings directly from company websites, avoiding the same morass of reheated ghost jobs that you’ll find on many competitor sites. This doesn’t mean that the jobs are great, however. The website still includes a warning tag “At risk of being inactive” that it slaps on any positions that have been around for a long period of time.

The board’s popularity points to plenty of distrust for existing job boards among the job seeking community: Many commenters point out that a lot of the frustrations of the job search come from navigating outdated or useless listings on popular boards like Indeed.

LinkedIn’s Two Hidden Job Post Metrics

Everyone knows that LinkedIn job postings include helpful tags that say something along the lines of “Over 100 people clicked apply” – these rough estimates can give job seekers a general sense of how likely their application is to be reviewed.

Now, one job seeker has taken a deeper look at the LinkedIn API to uncover a few more data points that anyone can find within Chrome. They reveal the specific number of job listing views and the specific number of people who clicked “apply”

To find them, follow these instructions, which were included in the Reddit post:

1. Open the job listing in your browser. The URL should look something like this: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4119480297/
2. Right click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect.” A window should open at the bottom or side of the page.
3. Click on the “Network” tab and reload the page.
4. In the “Filter” text box, search for voyager/api/jobs/jobPostings
5. You should see a single result. Click on it and select the “Preview” tab.
6. Click on the “data” field.
7. Press Ctrl+F (command+F for Mac) and paste in views
8. You should see something like “views:1146”
9. Press Ctrl+F (command+F for Mac) and paste in applies
10. You should see something like “applies:179”

Granted, that data might not be very useful to the average job searcher, but it’s fun to have available, and multiple commenters are already working on figuring out how a browser plugin might make that data available on the page.

Software Engineering Grads Struggle in the Face of Outsourcing

One of the more grim posts in the last few days comes from one software engineering intern whose mentor shut them down to their face, claiming that they could never compete with cheaper outsourcing options.

Their post ends with a hopeless line: “Feeling like I wasted 4 years of my life and I may end up homeless in a decade or so.”

The anecdote aligns with an op-ed from Business Insider a few months back, in which a UC Berkeley computer science professor at UC Berkeley arguing “tech jobs are drying up and graduates are no longer guaranteed a role.” A direct link to that article is among the most popular posts across the entire lifetime of the Job Search Hacks forum.

However, the top comment on the intern’s dismal new post does offer some rare encouragement from the forum: “Outsourcing comes and goes in waves. The last big wave mostly brought all the jobs back after the work outsourced was subpar. They just haven’t learned the downsides of outsourcing yet.”

It’s a form of encouragement that somehow remains just as cynical as always.