RSS: The Best Job Search Tool You’re Not Using Enough

0 Shares
Tweet
Pin
Share
Share

Although widely used on blogs, many people are still unfamiliar with RSS and its usefulness. There are a number of ways you can use RSS to empower your job hunting efforts.

RSS Makes Job Hunting Easier - RSS Day

What is RSS?

May 1st 2008 is RSS Awareness Day, a moment set aside to get more people familiar with this simple and simplifying technology.

According to the official RSS Awareness Day website, “RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called a feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.”

For an example, see the JobMob RSS Feed.

The above definition is particularly true for blogs but RSS can also be used to deliver pieces of information such as personalized search results and job listings like in The Ultimate RSS Feed Collection for the Israeli Job Seeker.

Your job listing funnel

Although there are more and more job boards proposing RSS feeds, the listings are often very general and can waste a lot of your time scanning for appealing opportunities.

There's a better way.

Most RSS feeds are freely available and there are many tools that take feeds and let you filter out only the bits that you care about. For example, The Ultimate RSS Feed Collection for the Israeli Job Seeker contains a feed that was created by using the popular Yahoo! Pipes tool to pull the job opportunities from a more general feed covering many topics. (A future article will explain how that was done.)

You can use RSS tools to “mash” together multiple feeds and create one super-feed that only contains your job listings. You could then have the total result emailed to you instead of being subscribed for individual emails per feed.

Ultra-handy RSS blending tools

Your inbox vacuum cleaner

How often do you spend an hour or more sifting through all your job-related email without feeling that you made any progress?

In See How Easily You Can Beat Job Search Email Overload, I recommended that-

“Ideally, your inbox would only contain email sent to you directly from other people, the kind of email you most want to receive when job hunting. Use RSS for a kind of second, lower-priority inbox that catches information you care about but that can wait for when you have a spare moment.”

To follow RSS feeds, you need an RSS reader. There are many choices just like with email. You can download software for your computer such as Mozilla's Thunderbird or you can read feeds online via websites such as Google Reader.

Use the best RSS readers

To get started, here are some recommendations and reviews from around the blogosphere:

Other ideas

If you're already using an RSS reader, which one did you choose and why?

Subscribe to JobMob via RSS or email to learn about the best tools for your job hunt.

Jacob Share

Job Search Expert, Professional Blogger, Creative Thinker, Community Builder with a sense of humor. I like to help people.

This Post Has 7 Comments

  1. Jacob Share May 1, 2008 Reply

    For my feed reading I recommend Google Reader, especially if you already have a Gmail account.

    I’m subscribed to over 150 feeds but Reader makes them easy to follow in its List View mode. Combine that with a great feature called ‘Trends’ which allows you to see which feeds you are actually reading from and you can measure which feeds you should keep and which not.

  2. gl hoffman May 1, 2008 Reply

    We have a unique aggregation service over at LINKUP.COM. We only aggregate available jobs ONLY from company websites, and NOT job boards. It is free to job seekers, and only $30 per month for recruiters who want RSS feeds from these company sites(up to 30). With the magic of RSS and now LINKUP, there is no reason to spend any time researching and hoping to find un advertised jobs.

  3. Jacob Share May 2, 2008 Reply

    Interesting idea, GL. You get the credibility of the company without the spam and ID fraud risks of the job boards. Nice.

Leave a Reply