Recruitment Blogs

Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 8:53pm Monday 01 December 2008

It started with an small idea, and has suddenly grown into a syndication machine... Last week, I was thinking about a way I can subscribe to all blogs/news sources - organised by the time they were posted, easy to find, as well as the ability to share the information with other colleagues as easy as possible. Recruitment Blogs was born.

Each blog/news source has a RSS feed. So now I needed a way to aggregate all the RSS feeds into one database, then output the data into a format that is user friendly, ability to search, easy to manage as well as updating.

It took 24 hours to get a beta site up and running. I had been working on a RSS scraping project for another client, and have utilized the “plugin” for the CMS I currently use.

It could have been easier to set up my own personal Feedburner blogroll, but I thought I would share it with everyone. There is a menu/blogroll at the bottom of the page.

Initially, there was around 8 main sites I visit every day to keep in touch with industry news – Recruiter Daily, Shortlist News, Michael Specht, Geoff Jennings, JobAdder, Human Resources Magazine, 2vouch blog, SixFigures blog etc..

It has huge SEO benefits, and initially I pictured this to be the “Wotnews” of Australian recruitment/HR news (Cheezhead did this over in the US)

I worked out that on average, there are 15 new articles posted per day (estimate) that’s around 75 per week, 3,900 per year! Currently there are over 300 articles aggregated from their RSS source.

The site has the following functions so far

Subscribe to a daily email alert, which will send you all the snippets for the past 24 hours.
One search for all sites (searches the title, short description and author)
Easy to use :)
Collects title, link, short desc and date, and arranges them all in date order via a predefined RSS feed into the database
Archive and Calender view options
No ad's or reference back to my own work, just plain and simple industry collaboration
Articles link back to the original article, plus info on the author
Aggregation is set hourly, and just collects new items
Top SEO site - if you think that every article then creates its own URL http://www.recruitmentblogs.com.au/Recruitment_Directory/-sheelagh-mckenzie-facebook-application-a306.html
Full automated
Send article to a friend
Report article – bad link, errors, and so forth

Very basic, its taken 24hours and I can’t believe how easy it has been so far. Most functions still need to be fixed and combined together. All the feed dates are wrong (parsing and UTF issues) but you get the idea

If you have any suggestions or would like to help me on this project, feel free to comment.