Using Yahoo! Pipes to Find a Job

I’ve recently had the distinct pleasure of looking for a new job. Job seeking, even when we’re not in a tough economic climate isn’t fun. Here’s a little tutorial to make it a little easier.

Broaden your job hunt

When looking for a job, you don’t want to limit your search to one Web site as employers post different jobs to different sites. Pulling all of these job resources into one feed can be quite handy and a one time effort can make subsequent searches even easier.

Additionally, some sites, like Craigslist, don’t allow boolean operators in search and/or don’t offer other advanced search options. Sites specific to job hunting like Indeed, Simply Hired, and Dice.com do provide better search constraints than Craigslist, but ultimately, visiting all of these sites and keeping where-you-saw-which-listing straight can be difficult and time consuming.

Enter Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is a service designed to help normal people build custom RSS feeds that can then be reused in other places. Pipes can help you accomplish this with no programming skill required.

I pull all new job listings for the search terms “product manager” and “program manager” in Seattle into Google Reader for later viewing, as it makes it easier for me to know whether or not I’ve seen a job listing. If you don’t use an RSS reader, you can view feed results directly on the Yahoo! Pipes web site.

I was inspired by Dawn Foster’s Yahoo! Pipes 2 Minute Vanity Feed Demo video which taught me how to build a custom feed to help track news about me and my company. I based my “Find a Job” Pipe on her demo as it was simple to follow and allowed me to “de-duplicate” job postings.

Rolling your own own “Find a Job” feed

Indeed, Craigslist and SimplyHired make RSS feeds available from the searches that you type in. I’m sure there are others, but I found these sites most useful.

• Look for the RSS logo or search the page for the word “RSS.”
• Copy and paste that URL into a text file.
• Go to my pre-made, job-finding Pipe.
• Next, click “clone.”

• Once you clone the pipe, you can then create your own copy.
• Click “Edit Source,” you’ll be presented with a window that looks like this:

• Replace all the URLs in the “Fetch Feed” module with the ones that you copied into your text document then click “Save.”
• Finally, click “Run Pipe.”

You should get something that looks like this.

Thanks

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you found this useful or if there are any changes that you would suggest to make this Pipe or tutorial better.