No matter where someone lives, they are likely to be interested in jobs which lie in the catchment areas of offices other than their own single locally-designated Jobcentre Plus Office (JCP).
Circumstances such as road and public transport links could play a large part in what people perceive to be their "acceptable travel limit" when looking for a job, or looking to swop jobs.
Anyone new to your area, or thinking of moving to your area is unlikely to know the names of the local JCP offices.
So JobsGoLocal exists to help you extract the raw data you need to provide a unified, local view of the latest job vacancies to come into those chosen JCP offices. By providing a localised view of the latest jobs you will save people having to travel to the Jobcentre Plus offices to see what was added yesterday.
JobsGoLocal API is a webservice exposed as an API which extracts from a national csv file the latest Jobcentre Plus advertised vacancies for your chosen area.
At the moment this site is unlikely to be of interest to you unless you are a web developer and you manage websites targetting a particular town or neighbourhood.
It is unique because you can not only specify the offices you would like daily updates but also a range of formats that the raw data can be returned as, increasing the likelihood that your server will have native support for one or more.
It is free to use and while it is totally unofficial no warranty is given about the quality or accuracy of the data, which is taken from the jobseekers.direct.gov.uk website.
The data is updated nightly, so you are expected to grab what you need once a day, probably in the early morning.
Read a closer look at the data to find out:
- exactly what data is supplied
- where the data is taken from
- how to go on and find out more about it
- links to where I get the data from
- how to grab the original .csv downloads for yourself
Read the API introduction to get started, there are also links to the various API specifications and code examples.
This is my first venture into APIs and I would value your feedback on both the documentation and the API and want to make it as easy as possible for you to make any kind of comment.
My main motivations for doing this are:
- I value this data and the more people that re-use this raw data, the less likely the DWP will stop us from doing so
- I want to explore how APIs work in the real world, and learn
- I had already had done half the work for my own Town Council targetted websites, in fact you can see a working example showing typical data and the result of some simple formatting
So if your website serves local people then please try and re-use this data - especially if you are running a gov.uk domain. If you represent a Town Council and feel you would benefit from a data-driven website then please take a look at my Councilsites service.