Making a jobsite using PHP

I was involved in making a job site few days ago. During the development, I have studied how easily anyone can develop a job site using PHP (language independent in true sense) . So I decide to write a blog post about my experience and here it goes. But note that this article is not about scaling or balancing the load on your site during heavy traffic, heh heh.

When you start making a job site, the most complex thing that I’ve found is making the resume-submission-system. Specially the resume editor is more complex than most other parts of a job site. Numbers of sub sections makes it really “not-so-lovely” to code . I am not going to foucs on resume-editor in this article but want to help you on “how easily you can create you can make/run a job site by your own”.

If you want a ready made job-board software which you can just plugin easily under your domain (zero effort, seriously) you can go for “job-a-matic” which is just register-setup-run type one. Please note that it doesn’t come with source code. Its just a customizable solution which you can run under your domain name.

If you love challenge but still want a ready made one with source code then you can go for “Jobberbase“. It is written in pure PHP and uses MySQL in back end. It comes with nice user interface and not-too-many bugs. To be honest, you have to customize it quite a lot if you want to make it revenue-ready, but getting a readymade platform is really helpful than making one completely from scratch.

The most difficult part of a job site (after resume editor) is the job bank. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the user interface is or how much user friendliness is there, all you need huge Jobs to serve your visitors. The audience is people who seek job. So if your job board is empty you cant survive for many days. Moreover you cannot expect that all the employers flood your job board with jobs immediately after release. Thats insane. So all you need is to collect the job posts from all other sites (leeching? heh heh) . Lets see what you can do to handle this. there are two solutions

1. Make a screen scrapper which performs automated search in popular job sites, scrap the result in a readable format and display the result to your visitor when they search for a job using typical key words.

2. Take help of Job search APIs

I am sure many of you really don’t know that there are some cool job search APIs available out there which can give you amazing result from millions of jobs in their database. All of them provides REST based APIs. So you can make a job search system easily with the help of these APIs. Please remember to cache the result for some time to avoid millions of unnecessary calls to these API providers which may create a DOS attack.

1. Indeed.com API : Indeed provides excellent REST based interface to developers to perform a search in their database. All you need is a developer API key. You can get one from here http://www.indeed.com/jsp/apiinfo.jsp.

2. Career Jet API : Career jet also provides REST based interface for developers. And specially for Perl and PHP developers they provide a nice REST library to make it much easier. You can take a look at here to get the PHP library and code examples.

3. CareerBuilder API : CareerBuilder provides REST interface to integrate their database of over 1.5 million jobs to your website (I doubt the number, but lets not focus on that) – So you can get some information about their API from here http://api.careerbuilder.com

4. Simply Hired API : Using simply hired REST APIs yu can search jobs from their gigantic database. You can take a look at the details of thier API usage policy from http://www.simplyhired.com/a/publishers/overview. For access to their job database and complete documentation of the API, you have to mail them at partners@simplyhired.com.

So whats left? Popularity? Well – that depends on how creative you are and how successfully you can turn user experience to a colorful moment. its another big story – heh heh 😀

Lets have some happy making-a-jobsite time.