Long time listener, First time caller…
This morning’s post is simply a reader with questions.
Chad,
I’m building a job board for Cincinnati as a hobby. A few years ago, I realized that the big 3 job sites showed less than 20% of all the job openings in Cincinnati. I think job seekers would be a lot better off if they had a job board that showed two or three times that amount.
To stay informed on the job market, I started reading your blog. I’m hoping that you can answer two questions for me:
1. How can I get access to the XML feeds that you provide to other job sites?
2. Why has the recruiter’s adoption of RSS feeds been so slow?
It seems to me that using an RSS feed is the most effective way to post jobs. I don’t understand why such a small percentage of companies show it on their websites.
Thanks for any advice you can provide.
John
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John,
You are absolutely correct; research was completed by Taleo Research, formally iLogos, a few years back that showed about 30% of major F500 company jobs were posted on the big boards, nationwide. Why you might ask? Companies cannot afford to post all of their jobs to just one of the big 3, let alone all of them. So where can all of the jobs be found? Easy, the corporate career site, which is why the JobCentral technology was first created, back in 2001, to index 100% of those jobs daily.
Answering you questions:
1) We can provide the jobs in an XML format, refreshed daily by JobCentral
2) Our industry adopts new technology slower than most, although once it’s adopted it’s extremely hard to change.
My prediction is RSS/XML will catch like wild fire and reach mainstream adoption, no question. RSS is extremely flexible, simple, and most companies don’t even realize the power of simply adding it to their career site. Job seekers are plugging these feeds into their RSS reader, desktops, etc.
In the end, RSS will be adopted mainstream after companies understand the power of these really simple feeds, the benefits to the job seeker, moreover the practical application. I also believe these feeds will be more than a pick-up point for job seekers, rather a trusted feed for partners and vendors.
Best regards,
Chad
Comments(4)
Chad, when will we all learn, RSS won’t work for job ‘posting’, we have been told remember :>)
What a novel idea tho, if only it would take off……
Sorry Peter my friend, but RSS and XML feeds can be turned into traditional job postings. We’ve helped many of our job boards partners do this for years. Yes it may be a step backward, with regard to progressing the job search eninge model, although I believe it makes good sense to help the hiring companies push relevant job content to tradition job boards, without their need to post and manage jobs.
Remember XML and RSS is just structured data and if the structured data consists of all the necessary attributes for a job posting – PRESTO!
Yes Chad, but what are the great multi posters like eQuest and Broadbean supposed to do if this happens? They’d have to offer posting for free and how would that fuel their global attack on the world?
Maybe they will just have to stop RSS??
Or maybe they learn how to adopt and leverage these feeds into their systems, feeding their metrics gathering platforms and offering their flavor of RSS jobs with appropriate tracking attributes.
The longer the resist RSS, the further down the rabbit hole they plummet.