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RSS Feeds For Job Listings - Value or Waste?

Posted by Cliff on from the innovative-tech-applications dept.

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?"

6 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Could Be... by jkakar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Are you coupling it with search? by dmorin · · Score: 3, Insightful
    If you're asking whether it would be valuable to have an RSS feed into a jobs database that allows me to watch for Java web application jobs in the north shore area of massachusetts, then hell yes it would be valuable. If it's just a generic feed of all jobs available at a particular company, than it is no more useful than any other "jobs at our company" html page.

    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
  3. Craig and other subjects by fm6 · · Score: 2, Informative
    I've been using the Craigslist RSS job feeds for a while now, and find it handy. A quick glance at my Sage sidebar tells me which feeds have new listings. A click on a particular feed title gives me all the new job titles, so I can quickly browse the ones that interest. I now check the Craigslist feeds several times a day, whereas I only used to check the Cragslist web pages once a day.

    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.

  4. Of course by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. Probably not in the context that you imply by blkmajik · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

  6. Re:Maybe you could hire a speller first? by schon · · Score: 2, Funny

    ask the slashdot editors to check your spelling

    Geez.. isn't that a little like asking SCO for ethics lessons?