Creating a RSS Job Feed

Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 4:10pm Tuesday 23 June 2009

Creating a RSS job feed can be a complex process and is best left to a programmer. So...what data should you include in your RSS job feeds? There are standard RSS specifications available, but we want to include extra data fields specifically for job aggregators to correctly index our data.

There are many different fields you can include. I have listed my standard RSS job feed template I use when creating job sites. This will be a good reference for any Career Site, Recruitment Agency or Job Board.

RSS places restrictions on the first non-whitespace characters of the data in <link> and <url> The data in these elements must begin with an URI scheme, such as http:// https:// news:// mailto: and ftp:// You can validate your feed at Feed Validator

Channel Elements

[TITLE] The name of the RSS feed, eg. "XYZ Recruitment Agency - Latest Jobs"
[LINK] The URL to the website.
[DESCRIPTION] A phrase or sentence describing the content of the entire feed.
[COPYRIGHT] Copyright notice for the content.
[WEBMASTER] Email address for technical issues related to the feed.
[LANGUAGE] The language of the RSS feed, eg. "en-us"
[PUBDATE] The date the feed was created. Use RFC822 format, eg. "Tue, 23 June 2009 14:25:30 GMT"
[LASTBUILDDATE] The date the feed was last updated. Use RFC822 format, eg. "Tue, 23 June 2009 14:25:30 GMT"
[TTL] Time to live indicated the amount of time (in minutes) that the feed should be cached before refreshing from the source, eg. "20"

Item Elements. Each job should have it's own <item></item> element.

[TITLE] The job title, eg. "Accountant"
[LINK] The URL to the individual job advert.
[GUID] A string that uniquely identifies the job. When present, an aggregator may choose to use this string to determine if an item is new.
[DESCRIPTION] Short description of the job advert.
[PUBDATE] The date the job was posted. If it's a date in the future, aggregators may choose to not display the item until that date. Use RFC822 format, eg. "Tue, 23 June 2009 14:25:30 GMT"
[CATEGORY-SOURCE] Name of the Recruitment Agency. You could use the tag instead.
[CATEGORY-LOCATION] Job Location, eg. "Melbourne, Victoria 3000 Australia"
[CATEGORY-INDUSTRY] Job Industry/Classification, eg. "Accounting"
[CATEGORY-SALARY] Job Salary, eg. "$50,000"

Here is the XML data structure for a sample RSS job feed.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title>[TITLE]</title> <link>[LINK]</link> <description>[DESCRIPTION]</description> <language>[LANGUAGE]</language> <copyright>[COPYRIGHT]</copyright> <webMaster>[WEBMASTER]</webMaster> <pubDate>[PUBDATE]</pubDate> <lastBuildDate>[LASTBUILDDATE]</lastBuildDate> <ttl>[TTL]</ttl> <item> <title>[TITLE]</title> <link>[LINK]</link> <guid isPermaLink="false">[GUID]</guid> <description>[DESCRIPTION]</description> <pubDate>[PUBDATE]</pubDate> <category domain="source">[CATEGORY-SOURCE]</category> <category domain="location">[CATEGORY-LOCATION]</category> <category domain="industry">[CATEGORY-INDUSTRY]</category> <category domain="salary">[CATEGORY-SALARY]</category> </item> etc... etc... </channel> </rss>