Skimming the Barrel or Scraping the Barrel?

Skimming:  Using quality websites that are targeted towards librarians and info pros.

Scraping:  Using job scrapers that search out jobs on the web and deliver them to you in a daily email.

As I look towards moving the INALJ Daily Jobs Digest into state/country pages, I have been mulling over which job scrapers I want the new Head State Editors to use.  As anyone on the job hunt know there are a tons of websites out there that claim to be able to find tons of jobs for you in your geographic area.  Indeed, JobFox, Monster and LinkUp are ones I use currently.  But often they bring up outdated or unrelated jobs and other times they miss great opportunities.  Out of all of them LinkUp is by far my favorite and the most consistent in results and timeliness.

This has me thinking about whether it is worth the time and effort sifting through the scraps that are found while scraping for jobs, or if our time is better spent skimming sites that we have verified for quality.

What I have decided is that while I emphasize skimming quality sites I can’t totally give up on job scrapers.  What I need to learn to do is use them better by using their advanced features and more targeted searches.  A search on Indeed.com of all of the US for librarians will result in tons of jobs to look through.  Instead I will be dividing this work up among 50 state volunteers, 12 Canadian province volunteers and a few international volunteers.  By dividing we will have more targeted geographic searches, fewer search results each to wade through and hopefully this means we will be using the job scrapers better or more to our advantage.

It is my goal that in 2013 INALJ broadens its results while deepening them as well.  Happy job hunting one and all!

-Naomi

 

reposted from 1/23/13

these are how I self-describe the terms skimming and scraping 🙂

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay.