The Unofficial National Jobcentre Mirror on Twitter

There's a section on support for Twittering Jobcentre Plus Offices and other third-parties in the section entitled Third-Party Twitter Support.

Tweeting and twittering

We've recently been investigating Twitter, the micro-Blogging site and we've put a series of pilots together for individual and groups of Jobcentre Plus offices. These pilots offer automatic updates of jobs more-or-less as they are seen by the JCP Mirror. The pilots are for Cumbria, and because they are automated, a special account has been set up for feedback and other human interaction.

Jobcentre Plus (JCP) 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".

Automated Twitter Feeds

The Twitter experiments have resulted in a number of loosely-themed Pilots, which are still running. They are broadly divided into three groups, the Cumbrian, the Heavy and the Specialist. These pilots aim to post jobs, 'tweeting' is the term employed, within certain criteria in Twitter accounts specially dedicated to that task.

The Cumbria Pilot

Twitter accounts for Jobcentre offices in Cumbria.

@JCPM_Carlisle

Vacancies posted in the Carlisle office exclusively.

@JCPM_ECumbria

East Cumbria, posted in the Penrith office exclusively.

@JCPM_Furness

The Furness district, specifically posted in the Barrow-in-Furness office exclusively.

@JCPM_SCumbria

South East Cumbria, vacancies posted in the Kendal office exclusively.

@JCPM_WCumbria

The West Cumbrian coastal plain. It's concomitant with the West Cumbria web-page and consists of posts made at the Maryport, Workington, Whitehaven and Cleator Moor JCP Offices.

Heavy Traffic Pilot

In any future national scheme, the smallest twittering entity would be a single Jobcentre Plus Office. Some of these offices are quite big and post relatively large volumes of vacancies. In order to judge the limit on this, the Jobcentres with the highest turn over were put in a pilot of their own:

@JCPM_Aberdeen

Vacancies posted in the Aberdeen office exclusively.

@JCPM_Barnsbury

Vacancies posted in the Barnsbury (Camden) office exclusively.

@JCPM_Leeds

Vacancies posted in the central Leeds offices of Park Place and Eastgate.

@JCPM_Nottingham

Vacancies posted in Nottingham's Upper Parliament Street office exclusively.

Specialist Feed

Although the other two Pilot groups are focus on geography, as an experiment an account was set up to see how a Twitter feed of one particular job-classification would be received. Although arguably it is not its primary purpose, Jobcentre Plus does see some interesting jobs that may merit re-location. A Twitter feed was thus setup to follow one particular Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) Code, since Jobcentre Plus postings are now blessed with such things. The author was, at one time, a Biochemist of sorts. This skill was chosen for the experiment in a rather arbitrary way.

@JCPM_National

Vacancies posted nationally, but indicated and categorised as having SOC code 2112: "Biological scientists and biochemists".

Twitter Feedback

The above Twitter accounts are automated, but we've setup one specifically for feedback and other human interaction (@JCPM_Feedback). We will try to monitor as closely as possible and respond to feedback. In the argot of Twitter, we'll respond to 'mentions', 'direct messages', and if you're a legit Human we'll do 'follow-backs'. We would suggest, though, that the occasional old-fashioned e-mail wouldn't go amiss.

Tweets Policy

There are some restrictions on the automated Twitter feeds. Not all of the postings on the Jobseekers Direct web-site; scraped and finding themselves in the JCP Mirror Database; on the FTP site and so forth will windup being tweeted. Twitter's flakiness will see to that, but in addition we've decided not to tweet the internal messages which seem to not actually be for vacancies but rather back-to-work courses and so forth. We abbreviate what little of the description we can put in the Tweet so that as much of the goodness gets through as possible. Messages are mechanically searched for 'boiler-plate' announcements about Local Partnerships, Agency postings and so forth, and these are eliminated.

The Tweet is augmented by a Hash-tag representation of geography of the posting, its SOC code and a tag identifying the 'posting' Jobcentre Office. The automated posts are geolocated as accurately as the original posting will allow. It was thus hoped that it would be relatively easy to locate vacancies using one of these hash-tags, or the 'nearby' search provided by Twitter themselves.

Third-Party Twitter Support

The concept that users may like to find Jobcentre vacancies on Social Network web-sites has occurred to a number of people. These Twitter users attempt to link directly to Jobseekers Direct vacancies and they also include the 'official' Jobcentre Plus (JCP) offices that are now active on Twitter. Due to technical reasons, however, they're not successful. But we help where we can.

There are now a number of Twittering Jobcentre Plus offices. These appear to be a grass-roots effort, with little apparent guidance from any central authority. There's therefore an endearing amateur quality to some of them, but, nevertheless, they do recognise and try to fulfil Social Network need. Twitter isn't just about organising riots. It is this same need that we've tried to address with the Twitter Pilots, and no end of experts seem to have recognised and written about it. In the absence of anything more formal, the Twittering Jobcentres are therefore the "Code and Consensus" that are required to make these things work. We approve and help where we can.

The services that we offer them can of course be used by any third-party with a Twitter account.

Redirection Service

A version of the redirection service has been positioned to help other Twitter users link to the Jobcentre Plus Mirror web-site and to the Jobseekers Direct posting of vacancy.

A version of this initially appeared in the Blog.

Jobcentre Plus vacancy postings appear on the Jobseekers Direct web-site, these days. There they have to be searched for, even if a reference is readily to hand. Once found the vacancy details are subject to a rapidly expiring session-identification mechanism, that defeats bookmarking and, more importantly, direct linking. Clicking on these things after a little while either gets you a cryptic 'session expired' message or dumped unceremoniously back to the front page. Twitter using Jobcentre offices seem to find this out early, and it leads to tweets, as these things are known, that contain instructions to go to the Jobseekers Direct web-site and search for a vacancy reference, rather than a simple link.

Redirection, but in a good way

While perhaps understandable, the vacancies don't last for ever, it is very frustrating. And it lead to the indignation that spawned the unofficial Jobcentre Plus Database Mirror. Part of that work included a redirection service that allowed a clickable link to be produced that displayed the original posting. It did this by effectively going 'under the covers' and doing a Jobseekers Direct search on the users behalf. This was rapidly found by others, and lead to one or two problems. Don't you just love the Internet? It also lead to rework that made the whole thing a good deal more efficient and cached.

Latterly, a URL shortening service has been added and a number of the official twittering Jobcentre Offices are using it. See the section entitled "URL Shortening" for its use. It has further enhanced redirection by reducing the physical link size, important to a space-limited system like Twitter.

Instant Jobcentre Plus Tweets

One of the things we offer is instant Tweets. On examining the details of a particular vacancy on the Jobcentre Mirror the link at the bottom of the page will allow a 'Tweet' of the vacancy to be constructed using the same mechanisms employed in the Twitter Pilots. The posting has everything bar the geolocation data. Twitter will allow this 'Tweet' to be edited before it is submitted. The most popular change is to stick a letter 'o' on the end of the shortened 'zois.com' URL and thus get a Jobcentre Plus representation of the vacancy, rather than one drawn from the Jobcentre Mirror.

URL Shortening

Some time ago, in the last century, ZOIS acquired zois.com, and to be honest it never knew what to do with it -- the web-site was built around a '.co.uk' address. As the Twitter experiments continued the usefulness of short URLs has become apparent. The point of bit.ly and its fellow travellers is now understood. Since it is relatively small, zois.com has emerged as a sort-of URL shortener, but only for Jobcentre Plus Mirror stuff. Under the covers Apache's rewrite rules are employed to get to the regular, larger, home.zois.co.uk based URL.

We're happy for people to link to our content in their tweets and encourage it with our Jobcentre Mirror URL shortening efforts. You can feel free to use the re-direct service that allows links back to the 'original' Jobseekers Direct post. We're happy to note that some 'official' tweeting offices are doing so already.

The 'original posting' will have expired by the time you read this, but you get the idea.

Briefly, as an example:

• http://zois.com/ROI78785 will get you dancing (local data).
• http://zois.com/ROI78785o will get you the original posting, if still available.
• http://zois.com/ROI summarises everything in that office.
• http://zois.com gets you to a search interface.

Disclaimer

As with the rest of our JCP Mirror works, the responsibility for the content of these Twitter messages, abbreviated though they are, rests with Jobcentre Plus.

Updates

As with other articles on this site, feedback is actively solicited and the author would be happy to receive e-mail on this. Should something require changing or enhancing then the fact will be acknowledged with attribution, if requested, here.

~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.