The Unofficial National Jobcentre Plus Mirror Updates Archive

Jobcentre Plus is a UK government inspired set of offices where job vacancies are advertised and the unemployed may access services both to claim benefits and aid their return to gainful employment. This has been, in time, augmented by a fairly useless web-site which has now undergone a revamp and renamed "Jobseekers Direct". This, and the counter-intuitive closure a number of these offices in Cumbria (including the one in Cockermouth, where ZOIS is based), has led to the Jobcentre Plus Mirror. The Mirror is a representation of the Jobseekers Direct data in a number of more dissemination-friendly formats and you can read more about it elsewhere.

What started it all, Cockermouth's former office

Updates, Notes, Queries and Responses

We've been getting feedback and making updates as things progress. Although not a 'proper' Blog, we'll endeavour to collate these things here in the hope that some byzantine Internet search will highlight it and you, Dear Reader, will be actually interested. The more recent of these Updates can be found on the main page, too.

Twitter Explanation Moved

A number of experiments are on-going with the Twitter micro-blogging system. These were documented here, but are now to be found on own page. 2011-11-14.

Northern Ireland FTP Feeds Removed

The Department of Education and Learning in Northern Ireland (DELNI) run Jobcentre Online, Northern Ireland's own Jobcentre system. For the sake of completeness, this used to be scraped and the data provided as an FTP feed, much like the rest of the JCP Mirror. Sadly, DELNI have recently introduced Captchas and a series of draconian Terms and Conditions. We've therefore stopped scraping their web-site and withdrawn the FTP feed. Please contact us should you wish to discuss alternatives. 2011-11-01.

Et Cetera

Now that Job Vacancy postings are vaguely classified we can see what's the most popular, initially on an office-by-office basis. 2011-06-27.

Overseas Office Renamed

When we started scraping, the Jobs coming from the then Jobcentre Plus web-site were apparently confined to England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland had its own separate system. We've only recently noted this, but the central Sheffield office, at Cavendish Court, has been responsible for a number of overseas vacancies. These are being posted with their own Office Code, so we've renamed it as Overseas Office so that searching is more accurate. It is interesting to see what's posted there and worth a little exploration, particularly if you're from Northern Ireland and not getting any joy from the Official DELNI site. 2011-06-07.

SOC Codes Appear, We Use Them

Sometime over the weekend, we think, Jobseekers Direct made one or two changes to their web-site. While it didn't break the scraper the changes do look significant. One of the changes is the introduction of SOC Codes.

The Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) is a magic number that kind-of defines a Job. This information was captured by the Jobcentre system, but not disseminated, but now it is. So, we're scraping it, and they now appear on the end of the CSV FTP dump. In addition we're putting a short description of a vacancies SOC Code on the Details page, together with a 'search for similar nearby' link. The usual caveats and feedback requests apply. 2011-05-31.

RSS Feed on the New Search Interface

As you can read, we've a newish search interface that allows you to enter queries like "plumber in Carlisle" and it will have a stab at truly finding Plumber jobs in Carlisle. Somewhat belatedly we've added an RSS feed for this. It means that you can effectively have this query run in background for you, on a frequent, automatic basis, and it'll update your favourite RSS/News reader with the vacancies you're interested in. From there you can generally explore the details with a more conventional web-browser. Our favourite, by the way, is Stefan Handshake's Sparse RSS on our fancy little Android 'phone. 2011-03-08.

Problems in Providing 'Original' Data

All part of the service, we provide a little function to get you to the original Jobseekers Direct posting. It's not as easy as it sounds and sometimes it goes a little hay wire. But it's fixed now. 2011-02-01.

Hookup in Scraping

Jobseekers Direct has changed its interface over the weekend, with some of the underlying technology undergoing some kind of refresh too. All of this, needless to say, broke the scrapers which feed the JCP Mirror database and ultimately the FTP, e-mail, RSS and '591' services and so forth. It also broke the Jobseekers Direct redirection system, which uses a kind of mini-scrape system too.

All should be up and running again, now. If you encounter problems, please do let us know. 2010-12-13.

A New Search Interface

As may be noted above, we've a new search interface that attempts to find jobs using a fuzzy match based on terms seen in the vacancy description and on their location, governed by mentions in a Local Offices. Give it a whirl, see what you think and report back to us. 2010-11-11.

More, Better, Scraping

Scraping of the Jobseekers Direct site has been improved and is now happening once every two hours. We've better error handling and retries too. This should allow our database to be a more accurate mirror of theirs. 2010-10-01

Back-up EURES Scrape

We're now scraping the EURES web-site for UK Jobcentre Plus jobs as a back-up to the the Jobseekers Direct web-site. This should improve the reliability of the feed and may, in time, allow a European wide version of our FTP feed. 2010-06-25

Thank you for your interest.

~Z~

Navigation

This is some navigation, it should appear at the side if the page is wide, and at the bottom if it is not.

Jobcentre Plus Mirror Search

We've two search interfaces to the database. One based on the local Jobcentre Plus office and the other on an ad-hoc search.

Find your local office: 

Example: "chester".

Or, alternatively, try typing this kind of query: something in somewhere. Everything's optional. Experiment!

Find: 

Example: "painters or plumbers in wakefield".

Please send feedback about these searches.

Also of Interest

Juicy morsels from the rest of the site:

• Some site news; it's a sort of infrequently updated journal for the author too.
• Rather specific Technical Notes, the author can still bore people in the Historic Third-person.

About the Author

His name is Martin Sullivan. He's a fifty-something some-time computer programmer living in the quaintly named town of Cockermouth in north-west England.

The Company

ZOIS Limited is basically a vehicle for Martin and his OLTP work, he owns it. You can find out more about it elsewhere on the main site.

Pro-Bono Plug

Martin is currently on a health sabbatical, but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of therapeutic recovery. So, if you've anything that he can tackle on a non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him know. Unsurprisingly, he's particularly interest in biology, again, and the application of computing to it.