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RSS Feeds For Job Listings - Value or Waste?
Matrixxx1 asks: "I'm sure by now we have all tasted RSS, and the immense power behind it. I have been asked to integrate RSS Feeds for job listings and resumes. I was curious as to whether it has been done, and if so, by who? Also curious as to whether this would be worthy of my time to set up? Can anyone see this as a value to them, or is it just another bell and whistle that won't get used?"
ARGH! What's wrong with spell check, damn it, that the editors seem to have misplaced it!?
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
A wether is a castrated ram.
Then I assume you won't be getting hired under the guise of "Good Communication Skills" and "Proficient at Documenting Processes".
Or, if you are not native English speaking, ask the slashdot editors to check your spelling?
Ehh, nevermind
I could see it being useful if one could specify a search and have the results of the search be RRSified. Then you could do things like search for "programming c++ unix", stick a live bookmark on your Firefox bookmark toolbar and be able to easily watch new listings come up.
If it was just an "all the latest jobs" feed I think it would be far less useful.
In the reverse, if you are a manager looking for employees, then some sort of search/feed combination on the ever growing database of resumes would be interesting, too. "Alert me whenever a new resume comes out with somebody that has 5yrs of java". That would imply that all resumes meet a certain meta-data guideline, though.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
. . . I think a nice RSS feed would be great for searching jobs, but I'm just wondering if there could be more advanced functions added to is, so it would make it a custom RSS feed (So it doesn't show jobs that I'm not interested in, or have already applied for).
Just my $0.02
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Thanks, I didn't know that.
Yah, I wonder if this person has ever red a dayly "fourcast" of the "wether".
What is truly reveeling about pur speling such as this, is that it shos how litle the person reeds, comprehends, and retanes. Has this person ever seen the word "curious" or only herd it?
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Thing is, I don't seem to be a very typical RSS user. Most of them seem to be a lot better at divided-attention tasks than I am, and like to exploit that skill by having an RSS ticker, or something similar, in one corner of their screen. Which might not be a very good way to browse job listings.
I'd urge you to consider using Atom instead of RSS. It's not a big deal for the short term, since current applications seem to support pretty much the same feature set for both RSS and Atom feeds. But Atom seems to be a more extendable, forward-looking format, with support for "semantic web" features.
Believe me, it was awful.
blabla, lameness filter defeater...
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Other than extra context for processing by software, what does this add over Usenet? (And forget resumes. Handing your resume to a broadcast medium is foolish.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I've seen RSS results on recently launched work search engines, which mostly parse the sites like Monster.com and Yahoo! HotJobs, scraping the results into their database. You can mostly subscribe to the searches, not to the feed of jobs directly (since for national searches probably wouldn't do you much good).
o m/
RSS search results is supported by:
http://www.indeed.com/
http://www.workzoo.c
Not supported:
http://www.simplyhired.com/
The practicality of job searches as RSS feeds is pretty good for both active and passive job seekers. Adding a feed to My Yahoo! or local RSS aggregator can always provide pointers when a new job arrives.
Here's some advice: never apply to a job listing. Those are the jobs that companies can't fill for a reason (e.g. no one wants it or no one can do it). The best way to get a career-type job is through social networking.
Don't have the luxury of a social network? Then build one. You're going to need it sooner or later.
Speak truth to power.
Also curious as to whether this would be worthy of my time to set up? Can anyone see this as a value to them, or is it just another bell and whistle that won't get used?"
I find it difficult to believe anybody can be familiar with RSS/Atom and not see how this is immediately applicable.
A basic rule of thumb is that if it's a data source that is updated on an irregular basis, it works even better as RSS.
It's not about your website. It's about everybody's websites. Subscribing to one feed isn't that different to checking one website manually. Subscribing to a hundred feeds is a hell of a lot different to checking a hundred websites manually.
Companies of a certain size will have either internal or legal requirements to publicly post job listings. The reason? Legal defensibility against discriminatory hiring practices.
Don't get me wrong: networking is important to find out about the jobs or even get your foot in the door for small companies...but at companies of any size, you will be asked to submit your online resume for a specific job posting.
Thinking of starting a business in Minnesota? Me too! mnsmall.biz
http://helium.knownspace.org/whyknownspace.html
"KnownSpace is a data manager---something that can help users build, organize, reorganize, annotate, search, mine, visualize, and navigate large, heterogeneous, dynamic data spaces. "
Sounds like the job market, doesn't it?
replace as to whether with the simple word if...
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I may be the last geek on the planet who hasn't paid attention to RSS, but oh, well. The OP claims that by now we've all played with it. I'm still not even sure what it is!
Here is some Apache SOAP info: http://ws.apache.org/soap/
And here is how are good friends in Redmond do it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/
I have not used the Apache stuff, but in ASP.NET and C# it is very easy to both set up and consume web services. After promoting MS, I now need to go wash my hands.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
unix search
Of course, if this is an RSS feed for one small company, the value is a bit diminished. If it is for a large popular company like google, that feed would get a lot of usage. But bottom line, if your boss tells you to do it, get it done and stop wasting time on slashdot.
As an end user trying to get a job this is kinda useless, unless I really want a job with your company. If I am just searching for jobs and you are one of 30 companies in my area I'm not going to subscribe to 30 rss feeds to find a job.
Where this would be really useful is in job search portals that could aggrigate rss like feeds. You would have a standard naming scheme like "http://www.example.com/jobs.rss" (similiar to robots.txt) that search engines could hit looking for job postings.
Doing something like this would allow easy job listing access for your local chamber of commerce to aggrigate local job listings from local companies.
There's definatly possibilities, but I doubt that it's useful for end users unless you are a large corporation like IBM/Microsoft etc...
Oh, and nobody cares about SOAP, anyway.
Yeah, right.
Consider this: over 62% of all successful job applicants get a job via personal contacts/references. <1% of all successful job applications do a Bernard Shifman*. Your approach is towards the 'moran' end of the scale.
*Sources:
"The Career Networks," by Charlene Li, Forrester Research (Boston), February, 2000.
"Still Hiring -- But Wanting The Human Touch," by Tom Pohlmann, Forrester Research (Boston), November 29, 2001.
While these are a bit dated, the numbers still hold true.
Yeah, right.
The editors choose the submissions, but don't modify them in any way. It would go against everything Slashdot stands for if they were to fix the godawful spelling of this article.
Oh, wait... nevermind. They did.
For a job seeker, making your resume one among thousands is not an effective strategy, even if it takes little effort. When I have listed my resume in databases, the only result has been calls from recruiters in India asking me if I would consider commuting from California to Delaware. Presumably, they call people at random without reading even the address.
When job listings are free, as they are on company web sites, they often do not correspond to jobs that the company is really going to fill anytime soon. This is something I evaluate. Looking at how Google, for one has had the same listings for years, it seems they are fishing for whatever might come up. This kind of thing is not allowed in newspaper ads: it used to be considered unethical to collect resumes (which may be from employees of your competition) unless you have a bona fide opening. I am also suspicious of Craigslist job ads.
More useful are very targeted job listings. For instance, BayCHI runs a job bank for user interface folks. Employers know they are reaching people who have bothered to join a professional organization, and members know the employers at least know enough about the field to know that if they just want graphic design, they'll say so. (Unfortunately, BayCHI listings are also free and some companies have listed the same openings there for years too without seeming to fill them.)
Alumni organizations might be targeted enough to attract mutually compatible jobs and applicants.
Any great idea os only great if the implementation is great. For this implementation to be great, you must generate results valuable to the recipient, let it be set aside as trash.
So what I am saying is tha for every RSS subscribe you have to run a query, and seliver that as the RSS. As a matter of fact Monday I was finding myself wishing for this feature in careerbuilder and monster. But I fear just that they'll just tie it to an all-encompasing region which is NOT what I want . Career buioilder has an invaluable feature - the milage tabs. Such a RSS feed should respect my milage tab perference (10 miles) rather than sening me everything in the Balto/DC corridor.
So, yes, if you can and deliver a feed on MY specific criteria then it will work well.
I do use Craigslist's job RSS, but the postings are few so noise is minimal.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
http://www.matchtech.com/
http://www.jobble.org/ has info about the pros and cons of publishing jobs that way, including a few suggested customisations to the RSS