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RSS Feeds For Job Listings - Value or Waste? 49

Posted by Cliff 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?"
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RSS Feeds For Job Listings - Value or Waste? More

RSS Feeds For Job Listings - Value or Waste?

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  • Could Be... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jkakar ( 259880 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @03:58PM (#12079987)
    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.

  • Are you coupling it with search? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dmorin ( 25609 ) <dmorin@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @04:03PM (#12080114) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • . . . 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
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Your rant on why RSS sucks - while interesting - is, in my opinion, off base. (Although I totally agree with your opinion of XML.) RSS is missing two things: A max-new-headlines-to-get parameter and a this-RSS-feed-was-last-checked parameter. (These are data fields sent from the client to the server in the request.) Both should be optional, and max-headlines should have a server-side default. That way, if you checked this RSS feed this morning at 03:43 because you couldn't sleep, when you looked at it

  • Craig and other subjects (Score:3, Informative)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @04:21PM (#12080508) Homepage Journal
    I've been using the Craigslist RSS job feeds for a while now, and find it handy. A quick glance at my Sage [mozdev.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] 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.

    • I second the use of craigslist as a prime example. I've been using slashdock for OS X since it was a dockling (remember those?) and when I was unemployed it was a great way of quickly browsing the currently available job titles without even needing a web browser.

      I mean, I don't need to go into the advantages of rss (or competing techs like atom) as they are understood by this crowd better than most, but never the less. The point is that this is an incredibly appropriate use for whichever technology you
  • 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.)
  • 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).

    RSS search results is supported by:
    http://www.indeed.com/
    http://www.workzoo.c o m/

    Not supported:
    http://www.simplyhired.com/

    The practicality of job searches as RSS feeds is pretty good for both activ
    • Indeed.com and workzoo.com are interesting, and I think you for linking them. I was skeptical at first, because both sites simply aggregate listings scrapped from regular job boards. Scraper sites are usually a waste of time, with lots of mangled data and obsolete listings. But these two seem to be rather more sophisticated.

      Their RSS feeds are useful -- but it's worth noting why. The feeds are dynamically generated, and incorporate whatever search criteria the user specifies. So now I have several new fee

    • re: www.SimplyHired.com, we're working on our RSS implementation currently; expect to see it in ~30 days or so.
  • 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.
    • This is patently untrue.

      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.

  • Of course (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @04:33PM (#12080761)

    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.

  • 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!
    • the only thing I have touched it for (and a very light tap at that) is setting up azureus to download new episodes of the daily show every night because I dont have cable.
  • While an RSS feed might be nice, I would think a web service API like SOAP would be a little more handy to actually allow searches, etc.... unless the database of listings a resumes is not that big.

    Here is some Apache SOAP info: http://ws.apache.org/soap/ [apache.org]

    And here is how are good friends in Redmond do it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/ [microsoft.com]

    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 han

    • Use REST instsead [xfront.com]. However "easy" you say it is to use SOAP, it is that much easier to do it the RESTful way.

      Oh, and nobody cares about SOAP [redmonk.com], anyway.

      • Oh, and nobody cares about SOAP, anyway.

        Nobody like all the major software vendors? Nobody like the biggest retailer in the world using it as the standard for communication with vendors? Come on man, you provide a link to some dinky little web site where some guy writes some crap about SOAP? Have you ever used SOAP in a real world situation? I have, and it works great.

  • You can create RSS feeds for job searches on craigslist. Very handy. Example:
    unix search [craigslist.org]

    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.

  • Probably not in the context that you imply (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blkmajik ( 3321 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @05:53PM (#12082058)
    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...
  • You are wasting your time, unless you are getting paid to waste your time (gotta love CorpAm!)

    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 [petemoss.com]*. 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

  • For an employer, an unsolicited resume is not very useful. Though this is not an unreasonable way to find recent grads, it is not how people get hired once they have some experience. The effort of finding the one good candidate among thousands is just not worth it, even if it might seem the fair way to go about things.

    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

  • 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 in
  • http://www.jobble.org/ [jobble.org] has info about the pros and cons of publishing jobs that way, including a few suggested customisations to the RSS

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