Since people started living in communities larger than 20, there's been a need to advertise things for sale, and things required. The majority of job advertising still thinks that way, with a piece of paper up in a shop window advertising a job vacancy - it's great if you happen to walk past, but not so convenient if you're on a bus. At the other end of the scale, large organisations advertise almost exclusively in print (normally in the same newspaper they always advertise in) which means they're probably choosing candidates that share the same values and thought processes of their current staff (a short term benefit and a long term risk).

The proposed solution (a lot of organisations have been doing this for years) is to publish jobs in formats which allow (or encourage) dissemination, whether that's by word of mouth, photocopied advertisements, emails sent round to staff, or advertising on the web. The organisations that do this best typically get their pick of the best staff.

How should I be publishing my jobs ?
The first thing to realise is that organisations should keep doing what they're doing now - job seekers will expect to find their ads in the newspapers or pasted in their windows, publishing jobs online, in multiple formats, will be an additional channel.

1) The first step is to publish all jobs online, regularly, in a place that search engines can find

2) The next step is to publish in a format which other software agents can use (e.g. RSS)

3) The big prize comes when jobs are published in a format which is translateable and searchable by software and humans alike. Jobs published like this will be broadcast into every medium available by organisations who can profit (either financially or socially) from doing so.


What is job publishing ?
Job publishing is the process of putting your job advertisments (want ads, situations vacant) into a place where other people can read them. In the context of emendo, we're advocating that employers should advertise not only in print (if they're convinced newspapers provide a good return on investment), but also online.
. Advertising jobs online (on the web) is the best way for employers to get the widest number of suitable applications, and also it's better for prospective employees as they're much more likely to find you.

We already have our jobs on our website.
Great - that's the hard part done, the next steps are to consider whether they're in the format that's most useful for prospective employees (not in the format easiest for your tech people). There are a number of formats to choose from, the simplest being RSS, then RSS with extensions, then RDF. With each format there's a small increase in complexity (and therefore cost), but a big increase in functionality.

We're using RSS, what else should we do?
RSS was a giant leap forward, and loads of people are seeing the benefit from using it. The next steps are making sure everyone knows about your feed, and considering additional channels such as extensions to RSS, and also RDF.

We're too small to do this
No organisation is too small to get this right - you don't need to do it all yourself, and there are loads of organisations out there (including jobble) to help. You might consider posting your jobs on another site, using a content management system on your site that handles jobs automatically.

We're not very techy
get someone else to do the hard work - you'll soon be able to post your jobs on emendo.org