Postdoc search advice always suggest that you network to find postdocs since they're not required to be posted. My advisor's view of the world is limited to our university and he's not exactly in my area, so my networking has largely consisted of google supplemented by the occasional informational interview.
Early in the season, I targeted a few universities to find all of their postdoc listings, and wrote to them since postdoc announcements sometimes had little or no application information.
Quite late in the season, it occurred to me to search federal funding agency websites for the recipients of postdoctoral training grants. After finding the list of universities and PIs with these grants, I looked back at each university's website. My yields were about evenly split among three outcomes: the website had a normal postdoc announcement together with application info and deadlines, the website has a brief description of the postdoc with no application information, and google finds nothing at all about the postdoc so I emailed the PI.
Some postdocs are the sort where the PI assembles the money from their research funds, and that is the kind of postdoc that I thought you could find by networking. It's startling to me that federally-funded training grants, whose entire purpose is to recruit from a wide pool to recruit the best researchers into a field, do not require their recipients to at least create a local website with all the program information. Since many training grants have as their purpose to recruit new researchers from other fields, they can't assume that the researchers can find out about the postdocs from their social networks since they're coming from outside.
Nonetheless, it seems that the only way to find all the relevant federally-funded postdocs is to find out the funding mechanisms and look at the US government grant websites. Even setting aside questions of fairness, that's hardly good for the field, since wide advertising brings in better people than narrow or non-existent advertising.
Has anyone else found this in their field?
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