typewriting

jon udell appended his piece about rss job feeds to include some mention of what i've been working on, restoring some glimmer of hope in the internet for me. before that, i'd already tried to implement what he's talking about in the job feeds (see the "experimental" RSS/RDF option), but i don't really understand a lot of things about his example, and many of his answers to questions posted in the comments reveal that he doesn't either.

so i read a bit more about RDF, and then i started wondering if there isn't already a namespace dedicated to job posts that could simply be put inside an RSS feed. sure enough, there are multiple XML formats for job posts. the first i found is only accessible through google's cache anymore, and looks a bit verbose. but then i stumbled upon the HR-XML consortium, a high-price club including some big name companies, dedicated to developing XML formats for human resources (that's what they call us when they give us jobs). the irony here is that monster.com is paying tens of thousands of dollars to this consortium, and hasn't even implemented anything as useful as what i and rssjobs.com have for free just by scraping their pages. (note to monster.com: give me that money, and i'll make you some XML feeds and write the software users would need to read them.)

unfortunately, all of HR-XML's formats are geered towards being used by businesses rather than job seekers, and so don't include information any job seeker would probably want, such as salary. so i'm just going to expand on jon's very brief description what information a job post would include.

the only decent-looking XML format i found in all this was XML resume library, a project that will possibly open up some automated job matching possibilities once we get a job format established. my initial thoughts from looking for jobs for the past few weeks are that the following information should be included, probably some of it optionally:

• job title
• job description
• job location(s)
• salary (amount and currency)
• name of employer
• URL of employer
• contact email

i had some other thoughts, but i don't think it makes sense at this point to include any information that isn't very common. for example, some jobs have application deadlines, but that information could always be included in the description. comments are welcome.