So at last we are seeing some RSS functionality coming into the Irish Job Boards market!!! Irish Dev.com is a cool site that I have long admired for its well designed GUI, very relevant quick search categories, solid blog content and its pioneering embracing of RSS feeds! Well done. In a sea of recruitment stagnation finally a job board in Ireland has embraced a new technology that will create an exciting wave for job seekers to ride to easier job hunting.
So what is RSS?
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving summaries of the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News and Amazon.com.
How can it be used for recruitment?
In multiple ways. You just have to be creative. The two obvious ways are string searchs and advertising jobs... For example, check out Indeed.com and you'll see the power of RSS feeds. Also check out about the 5 million dollars the company raised to start growing. Also, check out two of the recent blog posts on Tom Raferty's excellent IT blog which addresses the subject back in March and follows the topic up again in May. Tom, quite rightly talks about the loss of fist mover advantage for Irihjob.ie and RecruitIreland the two job board behemoths in Ireland and how they will need to start thinking quickly about how to bring this functionality into their products if they are not to loose market share to Irishdev.com.
The technology has also got me thinking. It begs a big, big, big question to all recruitment managers. Why don't you build RSS feeds into your career sites.It seems like an obvious evolution in e-recruitment. It will allow interested applicants tag the category of jobs they are interested in and every time a new job is posted they get an alert. Cool! It will save the recruiter hours of mining for candidates and place the onus of contact on the job seeker. Which should translate into dollars saved on the ground.
It's going to be interesting to see how RSS feeds change the recruitment landscape... with the ever increasing seamless integration of technologies across multiple platforms the day is not to far away where you will get a quick text to your mobile if a new job in Microsoft comes up that you have expressed and interest in!!!!
