Making job recruitment a bit easier - suggestions

A short blog post arising because of my frustrations with the world not being as I would like it to be...

The English language affords us many words to get our points across but in the field of job vacancies its expansive repertoire might be more of a hindrance. As you may know, I run the @scicommjobs vacancies listing and have been collecting vacancies pages for employers of science communicators for the last seven years (http://is.gd/1KPor). Periodically I look at these pages to see if any new jobs are being advertised - many are also advertised in the mainstream media as well as certain mailing lists, but many are not.

In Jo World there would be an agreed word, perhaps 'jobs' and all websites would set their search engines so that searches for vacancies, recruitment, opportunities, 'work for us' and 'work with us' would all point towards 'jobs' and not return 'page not found'.

Secondly, all organisations would have a dedicated jobs page, possibly a sub-page of 'About Us' which most organisations already have. Some organisations advertise their jobs in the news section which is fine, but I can't see that it's a great deal of work to have a permanent page (even if it has nothing on it for ages until a vacancy appears).

Thirdly, let's pipe some RSS feeds from vacancies pages. I'd love to be able to send organisations' feeds to my blogpost* linked above so that when I look at it, the new jobs ping up - saves a bit of clicking. I think the benefits of this go beyond telling people there's a job that they may or may not want - the RSS adds content to the world, with your brand on it.

*I'm not actually sure if this is possible in Blogger, though it works quite well in Wikispaces http://skepticmedia.wikispaces.com/Events - I didn't add the Glasgow event (at time of writing one is coming up on 30 June), I merely added the widget that will update an RSS feed when a new event is posted.

Fourthly - and I accept that I might be on my own on this one - have an archive of all your job descriptions so people can see the range of jobs that your organisation has (even if not available) and can see, well in advance, the sorts of skills and experience required for a job that they may be interested in. This last point is primarily why the ScicommJobs Posterous exists - I've taken matters into my own hands ;-)

I think any or all of these would make it a little bit easier for people to find out about jobs, and to set up automated systems (reading RSS feeds) to keep an eye on what they're interested in.