The Unofficial Cockermouth Jobcentre Plus Mirror

Jobcentre Plus is a UK government inspired set of offices where Jobs are advertised and the unemployed may access services both to claim benefits and aid their return to gainful employment. At a time of increasing recession the government has decided, counter-intuitively, to close a number of these offices in Cumbria (including the one in Cockermouth, where ZOIS is based). This leaves a general-purpose web-site as the main way of accessing vacancy information. That web-site is open to criticism from the technical stand-point and is thus the inspiration for a web-scraping and integration Technology Demonstrator that, unlike the other stuff (lame pretend shops and the like), we'll leave up on the grounds that somebody might find it vaguely useful.

The Demonstrator scrapes the Jobseekers Direct web site on a periodic basis, for vacancies posted as being within 15 miles of ZOIS's base in Cockermouth cleans them up and then displays a three-day list of those vacancies which appear genuinely local (posted in the still open Workington and Whitehaven Jobcentre Plus offices and having a location of something like 'Keswick' in the Kendal office). There's an RSS feed set-up on that page too.

This is a Technology Demonstrator and wholely dependent on the Jobcentre Plus and lately the Jobseekers Direct web-sites for content. It's their content and although they don't actually state it, it's probably their copyright too (so we accept no liability for the content). If anybody is unhappy about the subject-matter of this Demonstrator let us know and we'll happily take it off-line.

To all you aspiring Lynne Truss-types out there, 'Jobseekers Direct' seems to be the official spelling. No apostrophes.

A National FTP Feed

We're also doing a national scrape now too, based on this Cockermouth work. The feed is processed as a Comma Separated Values files and is put on the ZOIS FTP site in the JCP directory on a nightly basis. There are some README files explaining formats and so forth. If you would like an e-mail feed based on an individual Jobcentre Office then let me know. The Author link is at the bottom of the page.

Since nobody else seems to be doing it, we've sort-of produced a sort-of national version of the Cockermouth Mirror. One fills in a form with your location and we return a sorted list of our guesses as to your local Jobcentre Plus office. You can then follow the links and see what they've posted in the last 48 hours or so. Bookmark that search (or use RSS) and you can return on a daily basis until you find what your looking for. Or give up in despair. We've written some more explanation about this too.

Updates

Whitehaven JCP No-longer Posting

Whitehaven Jobcentre Plus office is no-longer posting vacancies on the Jobseekers Direct web-site. Responsibility for posting vacancies in Whitehaven and surrounds seems to have passed to Workington. Although this has been a prelude to shutting a Jobcentre Office in the past there is, as yet, no indication that Whitehaven's JCP Office will close. It does make our probing for West Cumbrian vacancies simpler. 2010-04-21

Jobseekers Direct

The primary focus for the scrape is now the Jobseekers Direct web-site. The Jobcentreplus search site is scheduled to close next month. 2010-02-15

Original Posting Reference, Facebook and Twitter

Some quite clever, unnecessarily clever, code has been added on the job-detail page which allows you to visit the original posting on the Jobseekers Direct web-site. Their page should open in a separate tab or window if your browser allows it. Less clever code now allows you to post the vacancy on your favourite social web-site and thus share it with your 'friends', 'followers', 'contacts' or whatever. 'Favourite' is a definition currently limited to Facebook and Twitter at the moment, more will be added as they become fashionable. 2010-02-18

Thank you for your interest.

2008-11-25