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How to Set up a Job Alert – Optimise your Job Search with TotallyLegal

Written by: Ani Pattni | Evie Courtier
Published on: 24 Nov 2023

Get the most out of your TotallyLegal experience – be the first to apply for the latest job roles. Follow this ‘how to’ guide, to discover how to set up useful job alerts and be notified as soon as a relevant job matches your criteria.

Job alert

Keywords & Job Titles:

This is a crucial part of the set up.

Enter your desired job title and relevant keywords to receive the most suitable roles in your email alert.

Example:

If you’re searching for In-House Counsel jobs, enter “In-House Counsel”, ensuring you include the quotation marks. The quotation marks instruct the system to look for the phrase, instead of In-House and Counsel separately which could include irrelevant results. If you wish to enter the industry sector here, such as a In-House Counsel within Corporate you would enter:

“In-House Counsel” and Corporate 

For an In-House Counsel in the Information Technology sector you would enter:

“In-House Counsel” and "Information Technology" 

The system will search for these keywords within the job title and job description to find the best match and email it to you.

Location:

To ensure you receive jobs that are either local to you or a commutable distance, we recommend adding a location in the form of a town or city and set the radius as 15 miles.

For example, London or Birmingham.

Avoid using postcodes in your search as this will not capture as many results as it narrows down the catchment area. 

Job Title & Category:

Select the most relevant from the menu. We recommend selecting a maximum of 3 from the list of job titles and categories. This will match based on what the recruiter has tagged to the job they post.

Selecting every option can be detrimental to your search as the results will be too broad and may bring up irrelevant results.

Things to note:

● Your job alert is a functional email and not a marketing email.
● If you have multiple alerts set up, unsubscribing from one, will not unsubscribe you from all. To stop all job alerts, you need to sign in and click ‘Manage Job alerts’ on the top right-hand side of your page. You can delete the relevant alerts you wish to stop receiving. This will not unsubscribe you from marketing emails.
● If you do not wish to receive the job alerts daily, you can set the frequency to weekly to manage how many emails you receive. This will round up the best matches roles from the week to send you.

Tips to Enhance your Job Alerts:

Revisit your alert criteria

Revisiting your job alert criteria can be all it takes to turn a weak job alert to a much stronger one that presents the right roles every time.

Things to check:

● Are the keywords set up correctly? Check for spelling errors and ensure quotation marks are in the right place.
● Are the keywords too niche? E.g. there may not be many results for “corporate communications”, but “public relations” may bring better results.
● Is the location too granular? If you are looking at a postcode or remote town, there may not be many matches, try expanding this to the nearest city or larger town. You may even benefit from expanding the radius.
● Check for duplicated job alerts: you may have 3 job alerts for the same job and location. Avoid receiving multiple emails for the same roles - delete the duplicates and set up tailored searches to capture more jobs

Create alternative alerts:

You can have up to five job alerts running at any one time. If you’re not satisfied with the jobs being emailed to you, think about creating some further alerts. For example, if you are a “Legal PA” open to new opportunities, you could also set up alerts for “Legal Secretary” or similar jobs. This way you can capture all the possible variations of the job title

Optimising your Job Search:

To further increase the number of job opportunities to which you are exposed, we recommend uploading your CV to your account and creating a jobseeker profile. This puts you in front of recruiters who may headhunt you for their latest roles - some of which aren’t advertised online. Your chance of getting headhunted for these roles relies heavily on the quality of your profile, so make sure to fill out all sections as accurately as you can.


 

Please contact Customer Services if you have any issues in creating or editing your job alerts.

Create a Job Alert today - kick start your job search.

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