By keyword

From our homepage - www.jobs.ac.uk - there are several options for searching for roles. Searching by keyword will return any adverts containing that word in the text, but there is also the option to search ‘job title only’ to return more specific results.

Once a keyword search has returned results there is the option to filter further using the menu on the left-hand side of the page, including options to filter by salary range, academic discipline, sub discipline, job type, location and employer sector. These filters will only apply to the results that the initial keyword search returned.

Once you have a list of jobs that meet your criteria, you can use the menu bar at the top of the list to order your selection by salary, the date the advert was placed on our site or by the closing date so you don’t miss roles that may be closing soon.

Boolean search

It’s possible to use double-quotes around a series of keywords to perform a search for an exact phrase e.g. “Lecturer in Crime” will look for any jobs with that exact phrase included within the job details.

It’s possible to search on the site using Boolean operators - AND, “+”, OR, NOT and “-“(Note: Boolean operators must be capitalised).

As an example you could search for term - “UCL” AND “Urban Politics and Planning” to find all adverts on the site that include “UCL” and the phrase “Urban Politics and Planning”.

The search - “UCL” OR “Urban Politics and Planning” would return all those adverts that have either of the terms “UCL” or “Urban Politics and Planning”.

The "+" or required operator requires that the term after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in the advert e.g. to search for documents that must contain "UCL" and may contain "lecturer" use the search - +UCL lecturer.

The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT e.g. to search for adverts that contain “Food” but not “Health” you could use the search - “Food” NOT “Health”

The "-" or prohibit operator excludes documents that contain the term after the "-" symbol. This works in the same way as the NOT operator e.g. to search for adverts that contain “Food” but not “Health” you could use the search - “Food” -“Health”

The search supports using parentheses to group clauses to form sub queries. This can be very useful if you want to control the boolean logic for a query e.g. if you want to find all adverts that include “food” or “health” but always include “safety” you could search for - (food OR health) AND safety.

By location

From our homepage, select one of the main options e.g. an academic discipline, a professional/ managerial / support area or studentship section.

There will be several further filter options available, one of which is location. From here you can select to return roles available in specific locations worldwide. For example, if you select ‘Agriculture, Food and Veterinary’ academic discipline, then filter by ‘Scotland’ the search results will contain all academic roles in Agriculture available in Scotland on our site.

By job type

All adverts on our site are categorised and indexed under a specific job type, either academic and research, professional or managerial, clerical, technical, or craft and manual.

Each category has further sub filters to enable you to conduct a specific search for roles available, using the ‘search jobs’ options box and then the ‘change search’ menu bar. For example, to search for a clerical role in a university in the Midlands with a salary of £15,000 per annum, you would need to select from the homepage:

1. ‘Search all’ in Professional / Managerial / Support Services

2. Select discipline(s) you are interested in

3. Type or role ‘Clerical’

4. Salary from ‘£14000’ to ‘£16,000’

5. Location ‘Midlands of England’

6. Employer type ‘UK and Irish HE institutions’

This will return all roles on our site that are currently listed under clerical, within your desired salary range and at universities located in the Midlands

By employer

If you have a specific employer in mind, you can either search for the employer from the homepage using the keyword search, or at the foot of the homepage, select ‘Site map’ then ‘Browse by Employer’.

This will return employers currently advertising roles on our site in alphabetical order.

By academic discipline

All of our adverts are checked and categorised by one of our highly trained staff before they are live on our site. Our site is designed to utilise the HESA subject codes that UK universities follow, and our inputters are trained to use these codes so that adverts under academic sub-disciplines are relevant to the main categories, and jobseekers searching for their research or academic specialism will always have relevant results returned.