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I recognize that the careers location fields are greatly useful for people who have more than one potential home base. However, my question is probably a bit more pedestrian:

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and have no intention of moving from the general vicinity. However, I'm definitely interested in jobs in, say, San Jose, South San Francisco, Marin, Vallejo, Walnut Creek, etc. That's a range of nearly 100 miles that I might be interested in.

  • Should I just assume that when employers do a search by location they'll assume that I'm willing to commute 2 hours each way?
  • Should I add each of these localities so I've got 10 different cities there that are all geographically near each other?
  • Should I set my location centrally and hope for the best?
  • Should there be some kind of "I'm willing to commute this far" option?
  • Am I way overthinking it?
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This is somewhat related to this question: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/25491/… –  Paul McMillan Oct 29 '09 at 21:11

2 Answers 2

up vote 6 down vote accepted

It's a good question, +1 for overthinking it.

You can enter Bay Area and the Geolocation will return California in the display - however behind the scenes we are storing the LAT / LON of the bounding region for the Bay Area as returned by the YQL (Yahoo Query Language) geolocation API. For instance, Bay Area returns:


If an employer searches for any city that either is encompassed by the coordinates or overlaps and matches any other search criteria an employer selected, your CV will be returned.

Update: Employers will search by a combination of region (for center point) and traditional distance radius. If this radius intersects any of the rectangles you've specified as work locations, you will show up as a search match for them. We try to be very generous in the matching, and let the two parties involved figure out whether or not the distance makes it a good fit or not.

A general rule - enter locations that encompass a surrounding area if you're willing to take a position that requires you to commute, or target a specific area - the choice is yours to make.

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What is YQL? (plus some filler chars) –  innaM Oct 30 '09 at 9:42
While this answer the question regarding how the CV data is searched by prospective employer, it does not address what is seen when you just look at the CV. If I enter San Francisco Bay Area (my case also), I very much want it to appear like that on any output (for instance if it is printed and/or forwarded to somenone else). –  François Nov 2 '09 at 0:57
Agreed. While the YQL may return that on the backend, having "california, USA" listed on the printed/web version is misleading at best - I have no interest in working in LA, for instance. Adding my real location AND bay area looks redundent. –  Paul McMillan Nov 2 '09 at 21:09

It gets a lot more complex in the UK. I was looking for a job that was easy to commute to.

So for driving I can say within “n miles”, but I have the option of travelling by train! There a lot of towns a long way away that have good train links, but only if the office is within walking distance of the station!

But asking a USA website to know about UK train times is a bit much! I don’t know a solution to this problem.

Maybe you should just have a map and let user draw in the areas they are interested in on the map.

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