RSS v's Multi-Posting

There is a really good debate on the recruitment blogs started by Peter Gold and responded to by Dan McGuire, regarding RSS and its potential impact on the multi-posting industry.

I have blatantly jumped on the bandwagon because I have a very strong view on the subject.

I treat most things by definition and the term Wikipedia use for RSS 2.0 is Really ‘Simple’ Syndication (I emphasise the word ‘Simple’).

I expect RSS could be used to bulk post jobs to job boards, however, surely the only boards that could draw benefit from creating an RSS feed of client vacancies to their site are the free to post ones; e.g. reed.co.uk and Job Warehouse from Jobcentre Plus.

I say this because recruiters and employers will quite happily load all of their vacancies onto free sites but when it comes to having to pay, they are much more selective and to my knowledge RSS cannot anticipate which vacancies to post and which not, in a real time, commercial environment. The cost of posting everything to all job boards with the meter running, is simply not practical and will wipe annual agency/employer advertising budgets out in a few short months.

The day RSS or any technology can read the minds of recruiters and employers, watch your backs for Arnold Schwarzenegger running around trying to terminate Terminator’s, because it’s also the day the machines take over the world.

In addition, why would job vendors want to set up and manage multiple feeds to the ever increasing range of job boards. Surely a technology with a single interface with the ability to multi-post to all job boards would be a much better creation!

Hang on hasn’t this already been perfected by the multi-posting industry?

I think multi-posting technology is safe for a good few years to come and RSS only has the opportunity to rival bulk feeds like XML.