Jobs via RSS: it’s time has come
Posted on August 19, 2003
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 76 views |
By now you’ve probably heard of RSS*. It’s this cool little concept by which metadata about stuff on the web gets made easily available to everywhere else on the web via a simple text-based XML structure. It works and it works well. And the one place it’s really missing is in publicizing available positions in the corporate world.
You’re looking for a job. You visit Monster.com and Workopolis every morning, and you troll through the help wanted section of your ideal employer’s websites each day. It’s a process that takes a lot of time and it’s fraught with the potential for missing that one interesting, ideal job and it’s prone to false positives.
You’re an employer looking for the best candidates for your positions. You post to said job websites and keep up-to-date listings of available positions on your own and still the ideal people seem to be employed somewhere else.
There’s a simple solution to making this process easier and more efficient for everyone involved: if you’re an employer, syndicate your job postings via RSS straight from your website. RSS works great for blogs; it works great for daily news headlines (if the BBC likes it, it must be good); there’s absolutely no reason it wouldn’t work for job postings and every reason it would.
Need proof? It’s already being used: mod_perl jobs; Linux jobs; Mac OS X jobs.
There’s already even a proposed namespace extension to RSS for defining job information in an RSS feed.
What’s missing from this equation is the use of RSS by individual companies to publicize their jobs. It’s great that job aggregation is taking place but for it to be really effective it needs to happen from the ground up. If you work somewhere that posts their available jobs to the web, it’s time to RSS-enable them.
*I’d link you to the RSS spec like everyone else does when they mention RSS, but the spec is remarkably boring and reading it is remarkably unhelpful if all you want to do is understand what it’s good for.