Get off your RSS!
“What are you doing after graduation?” Don’t know yet?!?
Well get off your RSS! And by your RSS – I mean your “Real Simple Syndications” and by off I mean – get on it! So what’s RSS?
I am not going to profess to be a scholar in all things digital or tech oriented. In fact I had to Wikipedia “RSS” to tell you what it meant. But what it means is not important. What’s important is what it can do…
RSS feeds allow you to gather live and frequently updated information into one spot that’s easy for you to access. Let’s say for example, you are interested in the popular column, The Sports Guy, that’s published regularly on ESPN.com. Back in the day, and I mean, oh… I don’t know, maybe 3, maybe 4 years ago… you would have to keep regularly visiting the site to see any new articles published by The Sports Guy. So maybe everyday you would visit ESPN.com and check for a new article. Or maybe you would log on twice a week or once a month, and spend a few hours reading any missed articles. No more, my friends. What RSS feeds allow you to do is subscribe to the site via a feed reader like Outlook or Google Desktop which then puts the articles into a little folder in your Gmail or Outlook Inbox every time a new article is published. No more sporadic and empty-handed visits to ESPN.com – now you get the articles as soon as they are published. That’s the beauty of RSS.
So what does this have to do with your job search?
A lot.
Did you know that you could RSS feed from popular job sites like Career Builder.com or Monster.com meaning – have those jobs sitting in your inbox as soon as they are posted? How about that for the early bird catching the worm?
And did you know that you can also use RSS feeds to do research on your favorite companies’ activities. Many employers have feeds on their sites so you can found out company info as soon as it happens. Wouldn’t it be nice to stare at your inbox and see a little box pop up that says, “100K jobs at Nike available now!” Okay – so that’s probably not going to happen but a girl/guy can dream can’t they? What’s more likely to happen is that you will get real time info about companies that you are interested in like earnings reports, press releases, new jobs, and stuff like that. But what better way to get current company info instead of just spending hours on the website. Give it a shot! Just look online to find out how you can configure your outlook or gmail account (or even your portal page!) to read some of your favorite sites.