Finding a job with RSS

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Posted by Joel on Friday, September 9th, 2005

Reading the classifieds is old news.

Many of you will already be familiar with RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Online evangelists like Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo and Steve Rubel are all heavily touting RSS as the next big web platform. And it’s true, RSS or any of the other formats (Atom et al., though they are all based in XML) give us a new and novel way to access information on the web.

Through RSS, the Internet is moving slowly from a “push�? environment (information is ‘pushed’ at me either through the web, email, instant messaging – whether I want it or not) to a “pull�? environment (I can ‘pull’ all new information where and whenever I want, and only the information I want).

Quite simply what this means is, the little icons or ‘Subscribe’ buttons you’re seeing on more and more web sites (mine included, look to the right…) allow you to keep up to date with the latest postings from your favorite blogs, news sites and much more.

Instead of surfing to a number of different sites each day to get your daily info fix, you can collect this information in a central location and quickly review it all on one page. Information received this way is often also referred to as a feed (Maybe because you have to feed that habit?) With feeds, you’ll always be on top of the most up-to-the-minute information as each of your chosen sites is constantly, quietly, pushing you updates and new items.

RSS recently got a huge boost when Microsoft announced it would incorporate the standard into the next version of Internet Explorer, and RSS feeds are starting to show up in many different places on the web. Already, mainstream media outlets like the BBC and the New York are using it to distribute the news, as are thousands of others sites.

On top of keeping ahead of all the latest news however, one of the places that RSS makes a huge difference is in a job search. Take me, for example. Right now, I’m looking for a job in Portland, Oregon. (Anyone need a good marcom, PR guy? Check out my resume…)

Many of the large job sites these days provide RSS feeds of the search results. Monster, Hotjobs all allow you to plug in your occupation keywords, desired work locations and preferred industries and allow you to subscribe to the results. Even Craigslist, a popular online community, allows you to subscribe to its job board postings.

So, in my case, I’ve subscribed to the feed of all new job listings for “communications�?, “marketing�? in “Portland, Oregon�?. Using a feed aggregator, a software application that provides a consolidated view of all my subscribed feeds, I can instantly view all the latest job postings from all the job sites in one place on my computer.

If I see something that fits my qualifications, I can immediately jump on it and send in my cover letter and resume. The bottom line is: Using RSS feeds, I won’t miss out on that golden job opportunity because I didn’t catch the posting in time.

So, if you’re like me and on the market for a new job – throw out that newspaper (well, recycle it at the very least) and keep an eye on the feeds. And remember…a little good fortune never hurts either. Wish me luck.

The following are a list of job search sites that offer RSS feeds:

Simplyhired.com (job site metacrawler)
Monster.com
Hotjobs.com
Craigslist.org

A fellow Joel, Joel Cheesman, recommends Indeed.com as a way to collect job leads from around the web.

Once you’ve set up your searches, you can collect all their feeds using one of the following options:

Web based aggregator
Bloglines.com (my personal favorite)
Rojo.com

Portal aggregators
Start.com (MSN effort)
my.yahoo.com

Standalone aggregator (Windows)
SharpReader (free, though you will need to install .NET)
Newsgator ($19.95, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook)

Standalone aggregator (Mac)
NetNewsWire (OS X)