On Quora, someone anonymously asked me to answer this question:

What are the best job boards or professional organizations with job postings, specifically for User Researchers?

I’m not sure that there is a best job board for User Researchers. There are many fewer jobs for researchers than there are designers, which makes finding positions more challenging.

For positions in the San Francisco Bay Area, BayCHI is an excellent resource. You have to pay for a annual membership to get access to its Job Bank, which is well worth it.  BayCHI also gets some job postings for companies who are headquartered in the Bay Area (or have a significant presence here) but are looking for people in other locations. BayCHI covers all of user experience, not just research; my unscientific glance over the past few weekly emails says that 10-20% of the job ads posted there in any given week are for researchers. Also, the monthly BayCHI meetings are good places to network, which might be an even better way of finding out about a position.

On Twitter, there are a few UX job aggregators. The one that I’ve found with the most researcher jobs is @UXdesignjobs.  It, like BayCHI, does not focus on UX research jobs, so you will have to filter out the design jobs that aren’t relevant to you. They do have a good mix of jobs at US companies.

A good Glassdoor search can also reveal appropriate user researcher positions, and they will automatically email you with new ads posted that meet your search terms. Glassdoor shows more jobs outside of the Bay Area. A good search is more likely to result in user researcher jobs; a few non-research jobs still sneak in. In general, the jobs that show up on Glassdoor are at larger companies, and their daily email can be repetitive.

Since you asked, I will note that my team at VMware is hiring user researchers.  You can ping me directly if you’re interested in this role.

I’m not aware of a great job posting site for UX positions outside of the US. Perhaps someone else can share insight there.

I’ve generally found that having a robust LinkedIn profile is an excellent method for getting approached by recruiters. This might be a Bay Area bias showing, I’m not sure how pervasive LinkedIn is outside of the Bay Area. I do regularly get contacted by recruiters on LinkedIn from outside the Bay Area. I sometimes hear from recruiters who don’t get the difference between UX design and UX research, and I occasionally get recruiters who see “researcher” and think that I’m conducting scientific research. Overall, though, I think that my LinkedIn profile is one of the most useful tools when I am looking for a job.