Manually Importing Jobs (Basic)
Before reading this article please make sure you’ve followed the guided tutorial for detailed introduction about each of the steps of the import process.
Besides the readily available guided tutorial and screen help there’s also detailed tips for most of the option you see on screen. To read the tips just hover the ‘?‘ icons .
Importing Jobs
Importing jobs is as simple as pasting a valid jobs RSS feed into the feed URL field:
You can also choose a feed from the pre-set list of providers. Browse or use the predictive search to find a good job provider for your site target:
When you select a pre-set provider you’ll be given some additional fields to fine tune the type of jobs to pull (premium plans only). Since this is the basic import support article, we’ll skip the additional options and just use the default feed.
After you choose the provider you’ll need to copy&paste their feed URL to the respective field:
Make sure you click the link displayed under Your Custom RSS Feed to paste it on the Feed URL field.
The Sample Table
After you have your feed ready (custom or pre-set) on the Feed URL field, you can see a sample of its content by clicking the Load button:
When you load a feed you’ll be presented with all the fields recognized by the importer and the total jobs available (*).
(*) Note that the free version doesn’t contain any limitations on the jobs imported. The total displayed is the effective number of jobs in the feed.
The sample table will vary with each feed, depending on the fields it contains. The only fields that will be common on any feed are the Date, Title and Description which map to the Job Date, Job Title and Job Description.
At the time of this writing, these are the fields that Go Fetch Jobs can import from most of its pre-set providers (*):
- Date
- Title
- Description
- Company
- Location
- Logo
(*) Since each provider can generate their own custom feed with all types of fields, with their own custom names, its very difficult to have a standard process that can recognize all the fields. Thats why the pre-set list of providers exists. The pre-set list is pre-configured based on careful investigation of each provider feed and thats why it can recognize more fields.
The importer will try its best to find and import/map the fields from any feed but if you want to have jobs with as much metadata as possible, it is recommended to choose a pre-existing provider.
Note that the data that you see on the sample table is effectively the data that the importer can process. This means that if you only see a short description then that is the description that the feed contains and what will be imported. You can confirm this by opening a feed URL directly on your browser.
Jobs Setup
With the feed loaded you can start doing some adjustments to the importer like, choosing the categories or job types (terms) that should be assigned to the jobs, through Fixed or Dynamic assignment or enabling the Scrape Missing Metadata option (premium plans only) to extract additional metadata for each job:
Choose the type of terms assignment (fixed/dynamic) based on your feed content. If, for example, you are using a specific feed that contains only ‘freelance, web developer’ jobs then manually choose those terms on the dropdowns. If your feed contains all types of jobs, choose the ‘Smart Assign’ (premium plans only) option to have the importer try to automatically assign the best terms for each job (read more info about this feature below).
Fixed Job Categories/Types
If you are importing jobs for a specific Job Category or Job Type you can choose the terms that best fit the jobs you are importing directly from the Edit Terms group. These are the terms that will be assigned to ALL the jobs being imported AND also the defaults for jobs where the automatic match didn’t work.
Click Edit to choose the terms. You’ll be presented with the available terms to choose (*).
(*) Note that the Job Categories will only show up if you have job categories enabled.
After you’ve selected the terms that best fit the jobs you are importing click Edit again to close the group. The terms you selected will be assigned to ALL the import jobs.
Dynamic Job Categories/Types aka Smart Assign (premium plans only)
Although you’ll see this option on a basic import, this is an complex feature so please refer to the Smart Assign documentation for more details when you’re more accustomed to job imports.
Scrape Missing Metadata
Most feeds provide very limited or no extra metadata, like job company, location, etc. Most of the time, they also only provide a very short job description. This is a limitation from the feeds and a very clear choice from most of the providers that don’t want to include full data on their feeds.
To circumvent this, Go Fetch Jobs contains a special feature that can try to extract additional metadata directly from the job provider site, including full job descriptions (*). This feature depends on each job site HTML markup and requires previous knowledge of that markup so its only available for select providers.
The option below will show up for all providers recognized by the importer scrape process:
(*) IMPORTANT: Please make sure you read the notice on Copywrite infringement. If you use this option please make sure you keep the automatic provider source attribution on each job.
When you click ‘Choose fields to scrap’ you’re presented with all the fields that can be scraped for additional data (*):
(*) This list will vary by provider.
Although this feature is a great way to get more data for your jobs please understand that it will greatly slow down the import process since the importer will need to visit the job site for each job on your feed to get the extra data.
The Jobs Author
As the name suggests, this is the step where you select the owner of the jobs being imported:
The name of the user you choose on the dropdown will be assigned to ALL the imported jobs and will be set as the Post Author.
Save Your Settings
At this point you’re almost ready to import your jobs. If you want to repeat the import at a later time you should save your options on this step:
Just fill in the Template field with a meaningful name and click Save. Afterwards, you’ll be able to load it directly, on this same page:
Tip: Saved templates can also to be used for Schedule Imports (premium plans only).
Go Fetch Jobs!
You’re on the last step! Just click the ‘Go Fetch Jobs’ button to start the import process You’ll be presented with a dog running while the jobs are being imported:
When the process finishes, you’ll be presented with a report that contains some stats about the imported jobs:
At this point you can now visit your backend job listings page to see all the imported jobs which are now on your database just like manually user submitted jobs:
Congratulations!
You’re ready to start your imports! If you need more granular control over the jobs being imported please read the article for the advanced mode.
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