complicated RSS question.
June 12, 2006 7:25 AM Subscribe
RSS feeds for search/query results in the "careers/open jobs" section of various company websites? More inside:
I work for a specialized recruiting firm. We recruit exclusively for one specialized technical professional that in turn is employed primarily by one major industry in the country. We acquire jobs to work on in a variety of ways; one of the most time consuming but most accurate way to find out if there is an open position that we could be working on is checking each client company's website and see what they have posted. Having heard a lot about new RSS feed generators that you can use to generate an RSS feed for a site that doesn't have one, I've been mulling over the idea of making RSS feeds for each client company website, to "broadcast" into feed aggregator such as bloglines, when a new job is posted. That's pretty simple. However, I don't want to find out when one of the companies we work for has a new janitorial position open. I only want to know about the specialized positions we deal with. Finding those particular openings on a company's website usually involved typing in a key word and maybe selecting a location or at least selecting "all locations" and hitting search before arriving at the list of those particular openings.
So here's the question. Is it possible to use a service like FeedYes to create RSS feeds for search results? E.g., whenever a job shows up that has been tagged by the company has being in our particular area of expertise (and most companies do ID them or tag them that way, since these professionals usually make up a specific department of any company that hires them).
FYI -- you may ask why we don't use the "subscription" service that many corporate websites offer, emailing you when a new position has been posted that meets your requirements. First, while many of the larger companies offer that, a lot of companies we target don't. Secondly, given all of the larger companies we deal with, that would be HUNDREDS of emails a day, and we don't have the staff to manage that; we'd rather just set up each recruiter with an RSS feed aggregator and let him/her browse which positions they want to track down.
I work for a specialized recruiting firm. We recruit exclusively for one specialized technical professional that in turn is employed primarily by one major industry in the country. We acquire jobs to work on in a variety of ways; one of the most time consuming but most accurate way to find out if there is an open position that we could be working on is checking each client company's website and see what they have posted. Having heard a lot about new RSS feed generators that you can use to generate an RSS feed for a site that doesn't have one, I've been mulling over the idea of making RSS feeds for each client company website, to "broadcast" into feed aggregator such as bloglines, when a new job is posted. That's pretty simple. However, I don't want to find out when one of the companies we work for has a new janitorial position open. I only want to know about the specialized positions we deal with. Finding those particular openings on a company's website usually involved typing in a key word and maybe selecting a location or at least selecting "all locations" and hitting search before arriving at the list of those particular openings.
So here's the question. Is it possible to use a service like FeedYes to create RSS feeds for search results? E.g., whenever a job shows up that has been tagged by the company has being in our particular area of expertise (and most companies do ID them or tag them that way, since these professionals usually make up a specific department of any company that hires them).
FYI -- you may ask why we don't use the "subscription" service that many corporate websites offer, emailing you when a new position has been posted that meets your requirements. First, while many of the larger companies offer that, a lot of companies we target don't. Secondly, given all of the larger companies we deal with, that would be HUNDREDS of emails a day, and we don't have the staff to manage that; we'd rather just set up each recruiter with an RSS feed aggregator and let him/her browse which positions they want to track down.
Last I checked, Indeed only searches large job boards, not individual sites. You can run your scraped feed through FeedRinse and get only the results containing the keywords you want.
posted by scottreynen at 7:41 AM on June 12, 2006
posted by scottreynen at 7:41 AM on June 12, 2006
I'd ignore the existing services. It's not hard to write a script that will do the search, scrape the text from the results page and output it as an RSS feed. You (or one of your company's IT monkeys) should be able to knock this up in an afternoon.
posted by cillit bang at 7:55 AM on June 12, 2006
posted by cillit bang at 7:55 AM on June 12, 2006
Response by poster: Indeed.com looks pretty good. I am curious though, if I can set up feeds for each company so we can easily see what is available with each company rather than sifting through the results from Indeed.com. cillit -- unfortunately we are very small and don't have anything like an IT department. This little project/idea won't be followed through on unless I do it, and my technosavvy is pretty light -- I can do things with really good tutorials though -- can you point me towards a website that might teach a real newbie how to write a script like that?
posted by Soulbee at 8:03 AM on June 12, 2006
posted by Soulbee at 8:03 AM on June 12, 2006
Response by poster: Oh, also, sites like Indeed.com and Monster.com have lots of results from other recruiting agencies that are posting the position they're working on -- these are no good for us -- using the company websites is the only way to go straight to the source.
posted by Soulbee at 8:08 AM on June 12, 2006
posted by Soulbee at 8:08 AM on June 12, 2006
you may ask why we don't use the "subscription" service that many corporate websites offer, emailing you when a new position has been posted that meets your requirements.
If you do choose to explore this further, maybe as a temporary workaround until your preferred system is in place, Bloglines offers email subscriptions that go into the reader itself, not your email client.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 8:19 AM on June 12, 2006
If you do choose to explore this further, maybe as a temporary workaround until your preferred system is in place, Bloglines offers email subscriptions that go into the reader itself, not your email client.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 8:19 AM on June 12, 2006
You might want to look at JobCentral, which is already doing the scraping of individual employer sites for you.
posted by scottreynen at 9:32 AM on June 12, 2006
posted by scottreynen at 9:32 AM on June 12, 2006
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by COD at 7:33 AM on June 12, 2006