Careers

What are job aggregators?

They’re online services that trawl through the Internet, locating and indexing jobs from job boards and employers according to the niches or geographies in which they operate. They’ve been around for a while – and almost all of them make the claim of having the most jobs, being the largest job board, or the most visited. The simple truth is that they’re quite similar to each other.

Despite this, they should still play a role in both a candidate’s job seeking arsenal and in a recruiters or employers advertising portfolio.

For advertisers (recruiters and employers):

The best thing is that most of these job aggregators are free. Most of them operate without requiring any direct intervention and they’ll silently come and trawl your site, finding your jobs and advertising them on your behalf. Because they’re mostly doing this in real-time, you also don’t have to worry about ensuring positions are removed when they’re filled, or expired. Just remove them from your own listings and the aggregators will reflect this when they next re-index or aggregate your job feeds.

Some of the aggregators will come to your site automatically and start aggregating your jobs, especially if you readily make available RSS or Atom based feeds of your jobs. Others, you have to specifically register with them and provide the direct links to where they can pick up the feeds. It’s still limited input, for what can often be access to quite a large potential market of jobseekers.

For jobseekers:

The job aggregators represent a quick, easy and accessible route to the latest jobs. They can save time by reducing the number of sites that you have to visit to find the jobs that are relevant to you and as they’re typically presenting job search results in real-time, you can be assured you’re accessing the latest vacancies. The bad news is that there can be serious problems with duplication; and some sites will try and bundle additional (sometimes chargeable) services with the job searching process.

For web developers:

Some of the aggregators have started offering APIs now too, so that you can directly integrate a fully functioning job search element in to your web site. The benefit to this is that can be another added facet for the services you provide to your users. The main downsides are that you’re effectively directing traffic away from your web site and you never hold the jobs yourself on your site, therefore there are no SEO benefits here. You also have little control over what’s displayed or how it appears. But they’re low effort, zero cost options that certainly can be a part of some sites.

Alternatively, you could consider developing your own aggregator using off the shelf php scripts, or considering plugins for blogs or CMS systems that can mostly do the job for you.

List of job aggregators:

This list is going to be forever changing, so right now, these are the main job aggregators (primarily UK based) that seem to have the highest profiles

Job Rapido – http://www.jobrapido.co.uk/

Simply Hired – http://www.simplyhired.co.uk/

Indeed – http://www.indeed.co.uk/

Workhound – http://www.workhound.co.uk/

Work Circle – http://www.workcircle.co.uk/