The jobs you won't find on job boards, and where German employers post them
German employers searched for staff on their own website in 70% of successful hires last year. That's the half of the market most job seekers never look at.
By Yiğit Şahin, founder of Expado · figures checked 29 October 2026
A large part of the German job market never reaches the big job boards, or reaches them late. In 2025, employers searched for staff on their own website in 70% of all successful hires, and for one hire in five the company's own site was the channel that made it work. Private job boards were decisive in 21%: almost exactly the same.
Those figures come from the IAB, the research institute of Germany's Federal Employment Agency, which surveys thousands of employers every year about how they filled their last vacancy. The headline isn't surprising once you think about it. A company's career page is free, it's the first place they post, and it's where their own employees send friends.
What this looks like when you're the one searching
When I moved to Germany and started looking, I did what most people do: LinkedIn, StepStone, Indeed, every day. I kept running into roles on company websites that I'd never seen on any of them. Not because those boards are bad, but because they only show what employers pay to put there, or what their crawlers happen to pick up.
Some of these roles turn up on the boards a week later. Some never do. A research institute, a mid-sized engineering firm in Baden-Württemberg, a public bank: plenty of them post on their own site and nowhere else, because they get enough applicants that way.
Who posts mostly on their own site
- Large German employers. Banks, insurers, industrial groups and pharma companies run their own career portals with hundreds of roles. Some of them put only a fraction on paid boards.
- Public employers and research institutes. Universities, Helmholtz and Fraunhofer institutes, hospitals and city administrations publish on their own portals or on public-sector platforms.
- Start-ups and scaleups. They often list every role on their own career page and advertise only the hardest-to-fill ones.
- The Mittelstand. Germany's mid-sized companies, often world leaders in a niche, and often invisible to anyone who isn't already in their region.
Why it matters more if you're new to Germany
If you grew up here, you know which companies exist around you. You know the big employers in your region by name and you'd check their sites without thinking. If you've just arrived, you don't know what you don't know. You can't search for a company you've never heard of.
That's the real disadvantage, more than the language. The boards show you the companies that advertise; the career pages show you the companies that hire.
How to search the other half
- Make a list of employers, not just job titles. Twenty companies in your field and city is a good start. Check their career pages weekly.
- Use the company's own job alert. Most career portals let you subscribe to new roles by keyword. It's tedious to set up, but it works.
- Apply early. Roles on a company's own site often get fewer applicants in the first days, before the boards copy them.
- Or let something read the pages for you. This is exactly why we built Expado. On 29 October 2026 it was reading 18,772 open roles from the career pages of 820 German employers every night, and matching them against your CV.
Start from the places with the most roles: Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, or all cities and topics.
Sources
Figures checked against these official sources on .
Expado reads your CV once and ranks every open role in Germany by how well it actually fits.
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