Where research jobs are posted first: EURAXESS, jobs.ac.uk and the boards LinkedIn skips

Why do you feel late to every research job?

Research positions are posted by universities, institutes, and funders, on the portals their peers read and on their own pages. EURAXESS is the European Commission's researcher portal; its page says it lists thousands of job opportunities from more than 43 countries and other regions, and that posting is free for institutions. jobs.ac.uk says it advertises for over 7,000 organisations worldwide: universities, research institutes, colleges, charities, and commercial organisations.

Funder pages are a clear case of positions that start on the institution's own site. Ikerbasque, the Basque Foundation for Science, offered 15 five-year Research Fellow positions for postdoctoral researchers in its 2026 call, and its calls site also advertised 10 permanent positions in 2026. That is a funder publishing first on its own site, the kind of page a commercial board does not always carry.

Which boards show a research job first?

In Oink's data for the 30 days to 27 September 2026, we compared the posting date a board reports with the moment Oink's database first stored the posting. Call it the age at first receipt: how old a posting already is when a job seeker's tool first sees it. It says nothing about when the employer opened the role or when it closes. A dot means fewer than 10 postings, or none.

In those 30 days, 80% of EURAXESS postings reached Oink the day the board dated them. Half of the jobs.ac.uk postings were already 1 to 7 days old when Oink first stored them. EURES had the longest tail of the three.

One caveat about the same-day column. On boards Oink reads through its stored inventory, a posting without a date gets the day it was first stored, so part of "same day" there can be that fallback rather than the board's own date.

The Academic Positions count is small because Oink reads it per user query rather than whole, so 24 is what our users' searches touched and says nothing about the board's size. Ikerbasque and the University of Barcelona doctoral page each gave us a handful of postings a month, too few for a row.

How often should you check each board, and how?

These cadences are one reading of the numbers above, for the boards in the table. For boards beyond Europe, Harvard's career services keeps an independent overview of global academic and postdoctoral job boards.

1. EURAXESS: every day or two80% of postings were same-day, so a daily look sees what is new. Open the deadline on the original page before you plan anything.
2. jobs.ac.uk: twice a week, short queries43% same-day and 50% within the week. In a July 2026 test we saw that long queries returned 0 to 2 results instead of 36, so short queries work better here: your field and a level. Its free "Jobs by Email" alert does the checking for you.
3. Academic Positions: turn on the alertThe Europe listing has a job alert that, in the page's own words, sends new jobs the day they are posted. All 24 postings Oink read there were same-day.
4. Funder and university pages: once a week, by handThe Copenhagen maths PhD page gave us 15 postings in those 30 days. A funder like Ikerbasque publishes its calls on its own site, so put the three pages you'd move for on a weekly reminder.
5. EURES: once a week, and read the dateMost EURES postings Oink received were already days or weeks old when first seen, and Oink drops anything older than 21 days at send time. That slow tail is what you check by hand. Read the date before you get attached to a listing.

What does Oink do for researchers, and where does it fail?

Looking for a job today feels like a second job, and for a researcher that second job is spread across the boards above. Oink does the first pass.

Oink pulls jobs from several public sources, removes duplicates, screens out explicit conflicts with your location, work arrangement or seniority, and ranks the rest against your brief, and your resume if you add one, on a 0 to 5 scale, with reasons and concerns next to each score. EURAXESS, jobs.ac.uk, Academic Positions, Ikerbasque, EURES and university-specific sources are among those sources when they are switched on, reachable and relevant to your search. The mix moves per user: Oink's adaptive source budgeting looks at how much a source supplies, how relevant it is, how often its jobs were delivered before, and its health, so no board has to show up every day. Local, niche boards are underrated. I keep adding boards, and when a new user joins, Oink looks at their case and prioritises the boards relevant to them.

Oink does not apply for you, it cannot promise a listing is still open, and its score ranks fit to your brief rather than your chance of an interview. The original page is the authority: open it, read the closing date, and apply there. The ghost-job checklist takes two minutes per posting, and the job-source guide explains why a named board can give you nothing on a given day.