The Unofficial National Jobcentre Plus Mirror

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 this web-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 I've found that postings by a particular Jobcentre Office a better geographical guide than trying to use Postcodes in the official web-search form.

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 Jobcenter 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.

This is vaguely another Technology Demonstrator. It is 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.

Type your location in to this form (the first part of Postcodes are acceptable) and we'll try and find your local Jobcentre Office. From there a cornucopia of vacancies awaits.

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.

2010-02-25