combining 2 many to many queries in Laravel Eloquent

I have the following tables:

occupations <- occupation_user -> users

occupations <- occupation_vacancy -> vacancies

And I want to find all vacancies that the current user shares occupations with...

I have it working by querying the occupation_user table to retrieve the users occupations and then using whereIn with the resulting array on the vacancies table.

I have a nagging feeling there may be a better way but I can't see it?

Can anyone advise?

public function scopeFilteredForUser($query, $user_id, $university_id) {
    $query->with('occupations')->select('id','university_id','title','employer_name','remuneration','city','state','country','commencement_date','num_positions','expire','contract_type','contract_hours')
        ->whereDoesntHave('users', function($q) use($user_id) {
            $q->where('user_id', $user_id);
        })
        ->withOccupationsFilter($user_id);
}
public function scopeWithOccupationsFilter($query, $user_id) {
    $user_occupations = DB::table('occupation_user')
        ->select('occupation_id')
        ->where('user_id', '=', $user_id)
        ->lists('occupation_id');

    if (empty($user_occupations)) {
        return $query;
    }

    return $query->whereIn('id', function ($query) use ($user_occupations)
    {
        $query->select('vacancy_id')
            ->from('occupation_vacancy')
            ->whereIn('occupation_id', $user_occupations);
    });
}

via Chebli Mohamed