Job listings: Who wants RSS feeds? at RunningWithBulls.com

Job listings: Who wants RSS feeds?

Published by bbt March 21st, 2006 in bernard, irishblogs, runningwithbulls.com, websites

As some people know, I work for a jobs advertisment/search site.

I have been raising RSS feeds, and the whole idea of using RSS feeds for jobseekers. The idea has been received…I’ll say that for sure
At the moment, in Europe anyway, RSS feeds are not too popular for jobs sites. This is changing.

As a little bit of market research I have a question for all:

If you got the function, would you use an RSS feed for new job listing notifications?

I would really appreciate it if you could let as many people know, and see what the feedback would be.

Also, please let me know, either in a comment or at the contact-us page.

thanks

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runningwithbulls, irishblogs, irish blogs, runningwithbulls.com, jobs search, rss, rss feeds, jobs listing, irishjobs.ie

28 Responses to “Job listings: Who wants RSS feeds?”

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1 Don Speekingleesh Mar 21st, 2006 at 11:30 am

Without a doubt. Finishing college soon so will be job hunting - had been hoping job sites had RSS feeds already.
2 bbt Mar 21st, 2006 at 11:33 am

Hi Don,

Thanks for the feedback. You’re in college? How many people use feed readers in your class? Do they know what a RSS feed is?
Would you be willing to view advertisments in the RSS feeds? Or would you shy away from it?

Just looking for feedback from people..what would make you say no..or yes.

thanks
b.
3 Don Speekingleesh Mar 21st, 2006 at 11:57 am

Finishing college in May.
Not many use feed readers, maybe half a dozen. Although most know what RSS is, I think, they’re just more interested in Bebo.
I’m not so keen on ads or partial feeds, but if the content is worth it then I’d have no problem subscribing anyway.
4 bbt Mar 21st, 2006 at 12:49 pm

Thanks Don,

So, I guess your studying something tech related? What about the use of RSS and new readers amongst the “great unwashed” (ment in an affectionate way ).

Yeah I have heard of Bebo Do you think putting RSS feeds available in Bebo would be of use/interest to students?

So, you would want full feeds as compared to partial feeds? What about full feeds which had topic related ads?

Thanks for the really useful feedback. Where do you get your information on jobs? From college resources, or do you find jobs sites on your own?

thanks,
b.
5 James Corbett Mar 21st, 2006 at 2:44 pm

Terrific idea Bernard, and about time! ;->

And I’ll put it straight into the Open Irish Directory under the Business & Economy -> Employment & Recruitment section.
6 bbt Mar 21st, 2006 at 2:47 pm

Hea James,

Well, not there yet. It has been floated. But….lets see what happens
Make sure you suggest it to others..I want to see what the feedback would be.

thanks
b.
7 Don Speekingleesh Mar 21st, 2006 at 2:55 pm

Yeah, I’m doing a Tech course. I think RSS takeup is fairly low amongst the “great unwashed�?. But the more they see of that icon the more likely they will be to find out aobut it. Particularly with more people using Firefox and IE7 when it arrives.
Yeah, putting RSS feeds in Bebo might gets students using it, dunno for sure though cos I refuse to sign up to it.
I would sign up to full feeds even if there was an ad in it.

I haven’t really started job hunting yet, but I suppose I’ll use whatever jobsites I find.
8 Damien Mulley Mar 21st, 2006 at 3:27 pm

Here’s the deal. Any site that is trying to connect with people needs RSS feeds. RSS we mustn’t forget is NOT a website to person delivery mechanism. It is a device to device mechanism for delivering content. RSS allows you to deliver to a computer, a mobile, a handheld device, a server AND another website if needs be.

A job website needs people clicking on links and logging in and applying for a job via their web service. What job sites sell is not unique, it is the same content as other job sites. Many companies and HR depts hedge their bets and have job ads on all the job websites. So think of RSS as a new weapon in an arms race and first to battle and winning the clicks of the enduser is going to win. If job sites are not offering proper, full and ad free RSS feeds then they will die. It might not be a quick process but they are going to lose. They need to stop being so arrogant and narrow-minded and they need to make the process of applying for a job as easy as they can make it. This means ,amongst other things, RSS which allows you to check websites via any device, from anywhere.

All it takes is one job website to offer the jobs you have on your website via web and rss and you are playing catch-up
9 keith bohanna Mar 21st, 2006 at 3:40 pm

Hi Bernard

Yes - if it was configurable so it only fed jobs from a specified search term(s).

keith
10 bbt Mar 21st, 2006 at 3:43 pm

Damien-thanks for the comment.

> Any site that is trying to connect with people needs RSS feeds. RSS we mustn’t
> forget is NOT a website to person delivery mechanism.

No, which is why using an RSS feed will not take the place using visiting a website, “it will get you in”.

>> A job website needs people clicking on links and logging in and applying for a job
>> via their web service. What job sites sell is not unique, it is the same content as
>> other job sites.

Definately. But some sites have more job listsing that others. Granny Smith apples, as opposed to coxes pippons

>> Many companies and HR depts hedge their bets and have job ads on all the job
>> websites.

In Ireland that would consist of about 3/4 main sites. There are some sites using RSS feeds but they do not operate fully in the Irish market.

>> So think of RSS as a new weapon in an arms race and first to battle and winning
>> the clicks of the enduser is going to win.

Yes. RSS will become the new weapon, just as e-mail job alerts were in the past. But there will be a certain take-up period. The majority are waiting for that time to come. But it is a “who gets there first” question.

>> They need to stop being so arrogant and narrow-minded and they need to make
>> the process of applying for a job as easy as they can make it.

I am not sure what you mean by “so arrogant”. Narrow-minded, well yes to a certain point. I would use the phrase trailing edge, when it comes to certain technology, but leading edge in respect to others (DB technology comes to mind).

>> This means ,amongst other things, RSS which allows you to check websites via
>> any device, from anywhere.

This is already something being looked at. Although from looking around, looking for jobs from any device, any where does not really seem to be too important.

Did you know that IrishJobs has an iMode enabled site? And its free (not like the Monster generated content). Not many people *yet* are looking for any device any time access.

>> All it takes is one job website to offer the jobs you have on your website via web
>> and rss and you are playing catch-up

Which is why I am trying to open their eyes to using RSS feeds.

Thanks for the comment, keep them coming.

b.
11 Justin Mar 21st, 2006 at 3:47 pm

Have you ever seen this?

http://www.rssjobs.com/

I came across it a couple years ago, but haven’t used it recently.
12 bbt Mar 21st, 2006 at 3:53 pm

hi keith,

thanks for the comment. Yes this is what I would be suggesting. For example, “java programmer”, this would be a job alert subscription you could create in your job search account.

Again the question of ads comes up - would you be willing to receive ads? Damien suggested earlier that sites that include ads would “die”.

I am not fully sure if I agree with that. Engadget for example use ads in their posts. I am happy to receive the ads (not that I click on them).

But the value of the engadget content outweighs the ads they serve.

Feedback welcome,

b.
13 bbt Mar 21st, 2006 at 4:27 pm

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the comment. Two comments in as many days
RSSJobs.com looks like a central feed stop for other jobs sites (also for the likes of simplyhired.com and indeed.com). I would bet (I haven’t looked into it too much yet) the jobs site would have to supply an XML feed for them, so they can index the jobs.

As someone who has created a del.icio.us social bookmarking app (for those who don’t know check out pukka @ www.codesorcery.net) how do you suggest providing feeds? With ads? Without ads? What about partial feeds?

One question I keep coming across is: how do we note/track the jobs that people actually look at, and the others that they overlook?

The only answer I can suggest is: we provide partial feeds, and require the subscriber to click on the link to get the full description.

From what I know, there is no real way to views of content *inside* the feed.

Anyone?
14 Justin Mar 21st, 2006 at 4:39 pm

Well, the way I recall it, you got a certain number of feed searches for free, but beyond that you had to pay a subscription fee. I always just thought that they might have been manually scraping the big job sites to put the info in and relying on the paid users to keep it viable.

My inclination is that RSS ads would suck. They generally do.

As for tracking, what if you password-protect the RSS, so you can track your individual users (NNW supports authentication over RSS, for example) and then include a “bug”, i.e. a small image or something in the post that radios back to your DB and notes that the user has opened that post. I believe this is how FeedBurner does its statistics gathering.

You could also let users bookmarks posts for later, after they’ve opened them.

Just throwing some ideas out there.
15 Damien Mulley Mar 21st, 2006 at 5:05 pm

When a recruiter rings me about a job, she doesn’t pause to sell me biros and then resume an existing sales pitch. This is the thing, the feed is already a sales pitch, the feed is an ad.

As I stated it is already about packaging of the jobs. Since these jobs will be seen on other sites anyway you will need a way to make someone pick your feed over another. You can do this by having a more relevant feed and by having a feed that is uncluttered. Ads would in my view be disrespectful and is pissing off a customer worth a few pence?

The key area of difference between engadget and a job site is that a job site wants to sell you something and the job is that something. Engadget wants you to read their content which they give for free and want you to click on an ad to keep them in school dinners.

RSS might not be big now but IE7 and Vista are around the corner and the sites that have RSS now and testing for all the various bugs ready in time for the IE7 RSS explosion are going to do extremely well. Go to a site, do a search and you get the option of subscribing to this search and have the contents appear daily in your Outlook or IE7 and no need to delete the thing as it just refreshes itself. You’re going to be most comortable too with the first job feed you get and a second feed you sub too that had the same content will just be binned.

This might actually inspire job sites to start doing more extensive profiling and turn the job seekers into agents themselves but that’s for a different debate…
16 Damien Mulley Mar 21st, 2006 at 5:29 pm

I think Nooked could tell you how you can autogenerate unique rss feeds that contain a special ID that can be logged and monitored. The url to a job can also contain that unique ID. I think partial feeds could backfire because it just adds more steps to a process and we all know (don’t we?) that the more steps the bigger the drop out rate. One additional step could lose you 20% of people and another 30% etc

What would be good is an option to “Apply for this job and send my on-file cv” right there in the feed.
17 bbt Mar 21st, 2006 at 10:00 pm

Hi Damien,

I’ll reply to your 2 posts in one.

> Ads would in my view be disrespectful and is pissing off a customer worth a few pence?

Well, thats for the big guys to decide, but my view would be no it isn’t.

> RSS might not be big now but IE7 and Vista are around the corner and the sites that have RSS > now and testing for all the various bugs ready in time for the IE7 RSS explosion are going to
> do extremely well.

You haven’t got to explain that to me! There are a few issues with IE7, but I am sure they will all be ironed out.

> Go to a site, do a search and you get the option of subscribing to this
> search and have the contents appear daily in your Outlook or IE7 and no need to delete the
> thing as it just refreshes itself. You’re going to be most comortable too with the first job feed > you get and a second feed you sub too that had the same content will just be binned.

Definately. I read a very useful article recently (I will have to find it..) that gave an interesting stat that between 17-32% (go figure on the swing of that!) users in the UK and US were using RSS feeds and didn’t even know, My Yahoo!, Firefox browser and a number of others would be the best examples of this.

> This might actually inspire job sites to start doing more extensive profiling and turn the job > seekers into agents themselves but that’s for a different debate…

Heh, this is an interesting thing, that I had been thinking about (kinda) recently. While we don’t actually *hire* people or anything like that (we are just “a jobs board” - we advertise the jobs, we don’t touch a CV.) if jobseekers had RSS feeds for certain keywords…add those feeds to OPML directories (ala James Corbett’s) and you have the jobseekers doing some of the referrals.

> I think Nooked could tell you how you can autogenerate unique rss feeds that contain a
> special ID that can be logged and monitored. The url to a job can also contain that unique
> ID. I think partial feeds could backfire because it just adds more steps to a process and we > all know (don’t we?) that the more steps the bigger the drop out rate. One additional step
> could lose you 20% of people and another 30% etc

Creating the RSS feeds would be sorted already. I would think of a 2 step process.

Lets see how things go,

thanks for the comments, and keep them coming.

b.
18 James Corbett Mar 21st, 2006 at 11:12 pm

Damien in right - the feeds need to be in ‘full’ format. It took me a long time to take a side in the ‘feeds with or without ads’ debate but now I totally grok Dave Winer’s view of the feed being the ad.
19 bbt Mar 21st, 2006 at 11:50 pm

Hi James,

Trust you to make me look and read more
Ah Jeez…now I find a bunch of stuff that I have to read to see if this makes sense to me, and more importantly to the people with the power.

Right..20 Dave Winer posts, with gazillions of comments.

Lets see what comes out of it.

I mean I understand thats the *best* for the reader (I would want that as a reader) - but lets be honest here….it has to be explained to a company to make it acceptable and for the company to be willing to do it.

b.
20 Bernie Goldbach Mar 23rd, 2006 at 4:02 am

We would subscribe to a tech jobs feed and a media jobs feed. If they’re full feeds, they have the greatest usefulness. We would incorporate info from the feeds into the “jobs” section of the educasts that we produce every week in Tipperary Institute.
21 John McClean Mar 24th, 2006 at 11:22 am

Hi Bernard,

If you could incentivise it by offering something back to web site owners to display your feed (e.g. bloggers) - some along the lines of a referall fee - you could be on to a winner. Irish Java bloggers may display listing for Irish J2EE jobs etc. Solomon Duskis has picked up on your idea and is using it to reach tech blog readers with new positions at the company on his blog (might be worth contacting him to find out what response he got as part of your research - his blog is New York Java Consultant over at JRoller).
It sounds like an idea where everyone can win - the recruitment site, the blog owner and the readers who land themselves a new job.
22 Fergus Burns Mar 24th, 2006 at 1:20 pm

Hi Bernard

I just posted a comment on Tom’s blog - http://www.tomrafteryit.net/recruitment-companies-to-offer-jobs-via-rss-finally/

feel free to ring me anytime - 353 87 9968868 if you want any best practice tips… don’t have all the answers but may help you avoid some of the pitfalls
regards
Fergus
23 Oskars Apr 25th, 2006 at 5:37 am

It is a good idea about RSS feeds. I would use it on my website. By the way, I found your website searching for RSS feeds of Ireland jobs.
24 Mario May 12th, 2006 at 9:57 am

Hi, Bernard, great post and very good comments.

We are creating a vertical search engine for jobs in the UK, with personalized RSS feeds, we would love any kind of feedback you could give us.

Trovit Jobs
http://jobs.trovit.co.uk