RSS: oDesk job alerts on steroids

By now, you may be well aware of oDesk's daily job alerts. However, job alerts only come once a day. Many jobs receive 30+ applicants within the first couple of hours of listing. And within those first few hours, many buyers are already well on their way to interviewing candidates and even making their selection!

Don't lose out on a job just because you didn't receive your job alerts in time. – and don't waste time constantly refreshing the job listing page, either!

Use RSS feeds to maximize your productivity.

Syndication made simple

Really simple. RSS stands for "really simple syndication". Essentially, it's an internet standard for receiving (and publishing) news feeds. If you use Outlook 2000 or newer, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, or Gmail, you're already halfway on your way to taking advantage of RSS.

Most blogs and news sites provide RSS feeds for visitors to subscribe to. Often, RSS feeds will be located in at the top or bottom of the website, usually signified by the orange square with white radio waves as in the image above.

Subscribing to an RSS feed is as simple as locating an RSS link on the website you are visiting, copying the URL, and entering it into your feedreader (Outlook, IE7, Firefox, etc).

oDesk job search feed

Whenever you go to the "Find Jobs" page on oDesk, you'll see the RSS icons in the upper right hand corner. If you perform a search, you can actually use the RSS link that appears on the search results page to save a feed of your search terms – this eliminates having to receive every single job in your search feed.

If you want to use Google Reader, Bloglines, or your browser to subscribe to the feeds, left click on the link to either the RSS or Atom feed – you'll be given the option to select which method you want to subscribe with in the dropdown menu at the top. If you're using Outlook or any other 3rd party feedreader, right click on the feed icon, and choose "copy shortcut", then paste it into your feedreader program when creating a new feed subscription.

Subscribe to multiple feeds

You can grab a feed for every possible search term you can think of. I, myself, have 4 search feeds that I'm subscribed to. Depending on your feedreader, feeds are usually updated within the hour (some clients, like Google Reader, cache their feeds, and it takes longer to receive an update).

Utilizing RSS feeds for your job alerts can save you time and net you faster results!