The Unofficial National Jobcentre Plus Mirror

And now a fuller, national solution

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".

While the official site has its uses, it fails to address the traditional needs of looking for a job relatively close to home. It seems to revel in displaying jobs from far, far, away, often with posting dates some considerable time in the past. Generally we've found that postings by a particular Jobcentre Office a better geographical guide than trying to use Postcodes in the official web-search form.

The form in 'Navigation' on the right or bottom, depending upon page-width, provides a search interface.

Our efforts with a sister site have been relatively well received and thus we thought to try and produce a national solution. To this end we've been scraping the Jobseekers Direct web-site completely, which seems to mean England, Scotland and Wales with Northern Ireland having a separate system. This is done each evening and the raw data made available via FTP. In addition we've put some web-pages together which will allow the user to identify their local Jobcentre Plus office and then see what they've posted in the last 48 hours. We've organised it so that you can bookmark that search-result page and visit the search again in the future. The idea being that you can come back on a daily basis until you've either found what your looking for or are too depressed to try anymore.

Twitter

Tweeting and twittering

We've recently been investigating Twitter, the micro-Blogging site, with some experimental endeavours based on the original West Cumbria work. This has in turn lead to the idea that a 'national' effort could be done. Unfortunately it has not been possible to produce a Twitter account per JCP Office, the large number needed would require automation and the automatic production and management of accounts is specifically disapproved of by Twitter, by their use of Captchas and the like.

We've also investigated the production of a 'National' system based on a small number of search-friendly accounts. The postings in these accounts would have key data flagged by use of specialised markers and would be geolocated, for 'nearby' searching.

Experience with the Pilot accounts has suggested that such an approach is not without it's problems. Twitter disallows large volumes of postings, so a number of 'National' accounts would be required. Twitter also appears to mark-down postings that would appear to be automated and repetitive. The Jobcentre Mirror postings are treated as borderline spam. Regrettably, then, it means that our earnest good works would be all but invisible to their target audience.

More has been written on the Twitter experiments elsewhere on this site.

Disclaimer

This is vaguely another Technology Demonstrator. It is wholly 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.

Updates

Older Updates are now archived.

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.

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 Handschuh's SparseRSS 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.

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.