RSS Feed Reader Apps have made the jump from obscurity to excellent productivity tools. They’re easy to use, help with content research and discovery, and have found application in marketing as well.
I’m here to tell you how you can utilize RSS Feed Reader Apps so that you can find your dream job without turning your hair white.
The pandemic has caused a couple of significant shifts. People have only online resources to use to find jobs, and more people aim higher. It’s not just about finding A job but about finding THE job. RSS makes that search a smooth sailing.
What Are RSS Feed Reader Apps?
It’s OK if you don’t recall RSS. It was popular over 10 years ago, which can very well be considered a century in Internet years. Time for a quick rundown of what Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is and how it works.
The short of it is that RSS is the way users could follow the content of multiple sites simultaneously without visiting each one individually. If you read over 10 sites regularly, you’d rather see their posts and updates in one place. This is what the RSS feed reader apps do. The reader subscribes to a website through an RSS feed app, which is an XML file in the site’s code.
Each time a site publishes a new article, the RSS feed updates and the RSS feed reader apps pulls the new article on its dashboard. RSS readers display every new post chronologically so you don’t miss anything important.
How can RSS help you find your dream job?
1. Saves you time
People often say that searching for a new job is like a job in itself. The job becomes exponentially more challenging when you set your sights on the heavens. The Holy Grail of employment – the Dream Job!
There’s much research that goes into finding job openings that meet specific, mandatory criteria, and you could very well be stuck refreshing job sites, boards, and social media groups ad nauseam. RSS feed reader apps are designed with utility and convenience in mind. Consolidate all your sources in one dashboard so that you don’t have to switch between sites manually.
RSS readers travel everywhere you go on your phone, and some even offer offline access, which means you can access your feeds at any time anywhere. The relief from reducing this process to a smooth browse through headlines and posts is palpable.
You definitely don’t want to add any more stress now, do you?
2. A more targeted search
The great thing about RSS feed reader apps are that they allow you to curate your subscriptions. You’ll notice you can group different feeds in folders, tag specific posts and save others depending on your needs. If you’re following many information streams, this type of organizational flexibility helps a great deal in spotting the best job posting quickly.
Some readers like Inoreader allow users to filter further by excluding or only showing posts containing a specific word or phrase. If you’re subscribed to a tech job board, filter the feed to show posts only in a particular city or position.
3. Subscribe to job-related feeds
The great thing about RSS feed reader apps is that they’ve graduated from just subscribing to blogs, news sites, and forums. The current generation has made great improvements in the support for social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
As long as the content is publicly shared, you can subscribe either to the poster or the hashtag. This is quite useful for the job or industrial threads on Twitter that updates regularly. Users can also add the feeds of public job groups on Facebook and LinkedIn to their dashboard.
If your reader can’t subscribe to social feeds, there are ways to generate RSS feeds with external tools. Inoreader has a handy way of showing if a site has an RSS feed via its Chrome browser extension. If there is, you can directly subscribe through the browser.
4. Keep track of the companies you like
Everyone has their dream companies. The ones that inspire you to achieve new highs or just look so good to have in your resume. I’m sure you’re keeping tabs on your favourites already, but RSS makes it a lot easier to monitor blogs, newsletters, company socials, and personnel social accounts.
You never know when the company will promote job postings through their channels – it’s an avenue worth pursuing. RSS feed reader apps support a variety of platforms and types of media, so you’re adequately covered. Users can also curate their feeds into folders, so you don’t get lost in a sea of posts but instead can scroll through feeds company by company.
Employer research also pays off in the long run if you end up interviewing for a position since you’ll have been closely following their campaigns, announcements, and launches. Every recruiter looks for candidates who know the company.
5. Get alerts for important information
It’s a first-come, first-serve economy. Do you want to land the perfect job? Then it would help if you pounced on the opportunity as soon as an opening is announced. Recruiters tend to remember the names and applications of the first applicants. RSS is designed to minimize distractions, which comes as a hindrance in this instant, but there are ways to get notifications on generous offers.
You could seek out an RSS feed reader apps with a push notification feature such as Inoreader or seek a suitable command chain on services like Zapier and IFTTT. Both support RSS readers and can perform a variety of actions based on a specific trigger. You can send yourself an email or text on a messaging service. The best part is that you don’t need to learn to code, and both services are very intuitive. You don’t even have to spend money since both services have basic free accounts, which is all you need.
Check out: What Is RSS & How To Use It In WordPress