Find a Great Job with RSS
11:29 am April 27th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
There are a lot of cool things you can do with RSS once you have a basic understanding of it and a few tools to work with. One of the most capable tools for RSS manipulation and aggregation is Yahoo’s Pipes, which gives users a slick (and easy to use) GUI that can do all sorts of things with your feeds as well as oher sources like Google Base, Flickr, and Yahoo Search.
I am currently self-employed which means I am more or less always on the lookout for a better job. I have found out that the method that works the best for me is RSS. Obviously the best way to get yourself a great job is finding out from a friend or contact, but barring that I think you are much better off finding a solid job on a niche job board as opposed to something like Monster.com or surfing the classifieds.*
My logic here is that if company is cool enough to post a job on the board of a site that I read than the chance that they are someone who I would work for is much higher than on a typical job board. This is not the best way to find a job that is simply a source of income, but if you are looking for something interesting with a company that you can really get behind then this is an ideal tool. This is especially true if you are looking for tech job and/or something with a startup.
As for the sites I have in the pipe- there are currently 21 sources, most of which come from sites that I regularly read. The type of jobs that come up are quite diverse (to match my mix-and-match background and many fields of interest), but they are all tech-related. They mainly fall under the loose categories of programming, designing, editing, and marketing, but I don’t currently filter based on anything aside from location.
New York Jobs:
- RSS feed
- the Pipe
San Francisco Jobs:
- RSS feed
- the Pipe
Notes- The pipes are obviously quite rudimentary right now. I only created the NY one so I could combine my feeds and then filter out the ones that were out of my region and then I cloned it to create the SF one because I figured someone would find it useful. I will be improving them and adding feeds when I have some time.
* [Please don't jump to the conclusion that this method won't work very well as it has yet to find me a job- I am lucky enough to be able to be very picky about where I work, plus I am not really looking very hard.]
