We’ve been conducting a little informal exercise to examine where government appointments are advertised online. The list is not exhaustive, but illustrates how tricky it currently is to find your way around online government recruitment advertisements. I’m getting it sorted but if you have any positive ideas, please just let me know in the comments section.
Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform:Â www.berr.gov.uk/bre/about/jobs/page44015.html
Communities and Local Government: www.communities.gov.uk/corporate/jobscontracts/generalecruitment/currentvacancies
Cabinet Office: www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about_the_cabinet_office/working_for/current_vacancies.aspx
Department for Children, Schools and Families: www.dfes.gov.uk/recruitment
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/recruit/vacancy.htm#vacancies
Department for Transport: www.dft.gov.uk/about/recruitment/secdftvacancies
Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills: www.dius.gov.uk/vacancies.html
Department for Work and Pensions: www.dwp.gov.uk/working/vacancies.asp
Foreign & Commonwealth Office: www.fco.gov.uk/en/about-the-fco/working-for-us/careers/vacancies
HM Revenue & Customs: www.hmrc.gov.uk/jobs/current-vacancies.htm
HM Treasury: www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/careers/curr_vacanc/careers_curvac_index.cfm
Department For International Development: https://atsv7.wcn.co.uk/company/dfid/jobs.cgi?SID=b3duZXI9NTAzMDI3NSZvd25lcnR5cGU9ZmFpciZwb3N0aW5nX2NvZGU9NDEm
Ministry of Defence www.civilianjobs.mod.uk/JobSearch.aspx
Department of Health: www.dh.gov.uk/en/Aboutus/HowDHworks/DHrecruitment/DH_4105999
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35 comments ↓
I would have thought having one central place (jobs.gov.uk?) would make sense. Maybe it could scrape all the jobs up from the other places, better though if it was the originating place.
A lot of the bigger blogs, like TechCrunch, have a jobs board. Maybe something simple like that could be thrown together.
You missed (supposedly) the central hub for all job adverts:
http://careers.civil-service.gov.uk/
…which totally proves the point.
Speaking of which… A few years back (2004?), whilst still a civil servant, I was actively lobbying the Cabinet Office to start offering XML / RSS feeds of job listings from that site. The idea being that individual departments’ HR teams would input their vacancies into the central database; then import the raw RSS data back into their departmental websites. I think I even offered to pay for the (generic) development from my own budget.
It should have been the perfect solution. Your departmental site could still have a page listing all your current vacancies, powered by RSS. The HR people would only have to enter the details into a single site. The punters would have one single site to search all opportunities.
By definition, I don’t need to tell you what happened next. But the idea is still definitely a goer – and it should be much quicker, easier and cheaper today too.
It’s a great idea – I’m still surprised how few RSS feeds there are for vacancies on government sites.
Here’s a very Web 1.0 solution to the problem – just link up the vacancies pages of government departments and agencies (we run a script every week or so to tidy up broken links):
http://www.governmentjobsdirect.co.uk/
My partner (who was job hunting at the time) identified the initial organisations from the list of NDPBs that used to be published by the Cabinet Office. As far as I know, this list is no longer produced.
We’ve been running the site for a couple of years, and now serve over 100,000 pages a month, funded by Google ads – so there’s clearly demand there for this information.
That would be a good thing to sort out. If I were you, I would set up an XML schema – nice and flexible if done well – that each department can wrap around their existing data. They can then publish the XML feed of their vacancies page, and you can create a jobs portal that harvests the XML feeds and creates an amalgamated online database. That’s phase one, and departments can have a timeframe during which they are ‘expected’ to start using it. That may be more or less sufficient, in that presumably each department will want to advertise jobs, and if they don’t engage they will miss out on all your marketing efforts to drive traffic to this portal. If that doesn’t work, phase two mandates it. Phase three is when you let departments enter jobs directly onto the portal using a generic cross-government process as well as via XML feeds, and each departmental jobs page on their website can just be a filtered feed back from your database. Nice and easy. Ok…it won’t be all that easy, as you’ll spend ages bickering (no offence!) over the XML Schema. However, it gets the hard bit out of the way at the start, and it will be plain sailing from there. I’d bet money that the mySociety.org could have you a demo up in two weeks if they were so inclined – even without the XML Schema.
RSS for new jobs would be a great start. Several recruitment companies like http://www.reed.co.uk etc do this already.
Er, what about the civil service recruitment gateway? http://careers.civil-service.gov.uk/index.asp
Does it seem too simple to say one place? For all of them?
[...] Where do you want to find government jobs online? 25 06 2008 Tom Watson MP asks here: http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/?p=2069 [...]
Tom,
What about all of the local government sites 450+
Local Government makes up the most significant part of government and is most spread geographically across the Nation and as such a great employer with opportunities more relevant to the widest group of communities.
Please don’t forget about them!
Joined up government and all that.
Dylan
While I see that there are people who want to work for “the government”, wouldn’t most people seek jobs based primarily on their skillset and abilities and then scope out the employer after finding a match to make sure they then match the applicants work ethos?
When I was job hunting, most of the applications were via agencies so I didn’t even know who the employer would be until at least being told I was through to the interview process.
I certainly do think that the underlying dot gov web data should be available in some form of standardised xml file so that anyone else could create a “jobs in government” website, but I am not sure how useful it would be to job seekers.
Probably more useful to people already working in government to see what is going on
The issue with all theses examples is that they serve people who are specifically looking to work in government. That’ll still be the case when you have a workingovernment.gov.uk website. What government really need to do is advertise jobs for translators on websites translators use; jobs for designers on websites used by designers, etc. In addition, government needs to advertise on general websites (you’ll find thousands of job ads on gumtree.com – but none to work for the govt [except through agencies]). It’ll be great if wfg.gov.uk has good syndication feeds (xml,rss,etc) so that third-party sites pick it up; but it’s still better to hire the best people by advertising where they hang out.
Pardon me for stating the obvious but shouldn’t all these be consolidated into a single site – maybe jobs.gov.uk or something similar. It would be a good example of joined up government and really not very hard to implement.
The Civil Service Recruitment Gateway (http://www.careers.civil-service.gov.uk/index.asp?txtNavID=176&635132=) advertises at least some jobs by department. It’ll even send you email updates. I’ve used it and it’s pretty good (as these things go!).
Dear hive mind,
You’re all on my Christmas card list.
Thank you for your help on this.
If not too late, I did think that the Civil Service gateway as the place for job vacancies, but it looks like theres a host of different sites containing such information. Shame really.
Government tenders and contracts are all collated through TED and Supply2.gov but this is only because of EU legislation requiring the publication of tenders over £140k on EU tenders portal.
I suspect that you have no chance of hearding the HR staff from Departments and Councils into using a single jobs portal without first making it a requirement to do so.
And don’t forget http://www.jobsgopublic.com where lots of local authority and other public sector jobs are advertised.
Apparently a lot of government ministers are also using a site called http://www.cvtips.com.
http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com
We did some work ago on identifying XML data standards for sharing job vacancy data (suggest you google HR-XML). The documentation was huge and we employed a technical consultant to idnetify the relevant fields. See http://www.twict.gov.uk/downloads.asp#Joined for info on our initiative.
The was taken forward into a North East regional eRecruitment initiative by our HR colleagues..
I totally agree with using RSS feeds for job vacancies on the different Government websites. The public could then use tools like Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com) to filter the data and create mashups/widgets etc. You could have listings of Government jobs in you local area, or have customised searches for any Government jobs related to a particular IT skill etc.
If you do have them all in one place (as you should), have drop-downs for different departments and you could still have links to them from the departments websites.
So if I wanted a job in DEFRA I might instinctively go to DEFRA, if all the jobs were listed elsewhere I might get frustrated and not bother. But a link in DEFRA to the jobs page might open up other jobs suitable to me as well.
RSS feeds seem like a good idea too so people don’t have to keep checking back.
Good luck with it!
Stealing the Tories’ ideas again, eh Tom?
[...] He has written an article on his blog identifying a range of government job vacancies web pages and seeks comments on this subject. [...]
[...] Recruitment for government jobs is a great opportunity to demonstrate how letting data free can improve the quality of government. Why do I start with such a blunt statement. This post pointed me to the growing discussion here on Tom Watson’s site about how recruitment in government might be given the Power of Information (pdf) Task Force treatment. Some thoughts: Treat all jobs for public bodies as your data set. Don’t get distracted by a big recruitment website. A number of comments suggest a single jobs.gov.uk website. The opportunity here comes from allowing information about jobs to flow into all the little cracks of the web, to be placed under the eyeballs of those with the skills, knowledge, passion and ideas to be brilliant at the jobs. This does not mean we necessarily need a single website where all government vacancies are presented. However we would need a mechanism for standardising information about vacancies and attaching that to a myriad of rss feeds. To do that we might require something on the web where jobs are submitted… How about a government jobs equivalent of flickr – where descriptions etc can be reasonably standardised, those submitting the jobs can add them to groups they think are relevant, tag them as they see fit but critically important others can further group and tag the jobs. Obviously all tags, groups etc should have their own rss feeds to allow sites across the web to bring the jobs to the attention of their niches. Social media requires social objects. Can the culture of writing job ads change so they become more of a social object, encouraging people to share them around the web? With that in mind services which widgetise government jobs and make them embed-able should be encouraged. (Did I just write widgetise a government job! Wince.) Geotag. Place is also a niche. Almost everybody has a geographical constraint on where they will work so all jobs should be geotagged. (imagine how developers/economic regeneration experts/community advocates etc might use such data. Think of the opportunities for schools/colleges/adult ed to monitor required skills and meet them). Crowd Source Job Descriptions/Person Specs. Most work cultures suffer from recruiting the type of worker they already understand to fill roles they already recognise. The government jobs version of flickr could also be used to seek suggestions of what skills would be needed to solve particular problems. Before recruiting pop up a description of what needs to be achieved (tagged etc) and ask people what type of person could nail that. Sort of a recruitment sandbox. Don’t stifle competition for employees. Government departments, NHS trusts, local councils should be encouraged to present jobs on their own websites in their own context. It’s partly there that they begin selling themselves to potential employees and this competition should be encouraged, not hampered. One final thought is that a single rss feed containing all government jobs would be political dynamite, a satirists Nirvana. [...]
I’ve blogged about this but for neatness here are the thoughts:
Don’t get distracted by a big recruitment website. A number of comments suggest a single jobs.gov.uk website. The opportunity here comes from allowing information about jobs to flow into all the little cracks of the web, to be placed under the eyeballs of those with the skills, knowledge, passion and ideas to be brilliant at the jobs. This does not mean we necessarily need a single website where all government vacancies are presented. However we would need a mechanism for standardising information about vacancies and attaching that to a myriad of rss feeds. To do that we might require something on the web where jobs are submitted… How about a government jobs equivalent of flickr – where descriptions etc can be reasonably standardised, those submitting the jobs can add them to groups they think are relevant, tag them as they see fit but critically important others can further group and tag the jobs. Obviously all tags, groups etc should have their own rss feeds to allow sites across the web to bring the jobs to the attention of their niches.
Social media requires social objects. Can the culture of writing job ads change so they become more of a social object, encouraging people to share them around the web? With that in mind services which widgetise government jobs and make them embed-able should be encouraged. (Did I just write widgetise a government job! Wince.)
Geotag. Place is also a niche. Almost everybody has a geographical constraint on where they will work so all jobs should be geotagged. (imagine how developers/economic regeneration experts/community advocates etc might use such data. Think of the opportunities for schools/colleges/adult ed to monitor required skills and meet them).
Crowd Source Job Descriptions/Person Specs. Most work cultures suffer from recruiting the type of worker they already understand to fill roles they already recognise. The government jobs version of flickr could also be used to seek suggestions of what skills would be needed to solve particular problems. Before recruiting pop up a description of what needs to be achieved (tagged etc) and ask people what type of person could nail that. Sort of a recruitment sandbox.
Don’t stifle competition for employees. Government departments, NHS trusts, local councils should be encouraged to present jobs on their own websites in their own context. It’s partly there that they begin selling themselves to potential employees and this competition should be encouraged, not hampered.
[...] Since then there have been a few speeches, some ideas have been floated for general consideration, like the recently announced Treasury review of how Ordnance Survey and other trading funds operate, and there’s been an interesting investigaion into how crime mapping might operate. [...]
Tom,
It’s possible that you now have every government job site listed on this page so it may become the de facto employment portal
Don’t think anyone’s raised the public appointments site(s):
http://www.publicappts-vacs.gov.uk/
This is for non-execs and chairs etc etc of NHS Trusts and assorted quangos.
The Arts Council has an email list, covering funded and unfunded orgs as well as public bodies.
http://www.artsjobs.org.uk
Their own jobs are here:
Arts Council Jobs
And then of course there is this one:
W4MP which includes copious opportunities for slavery, family firms uttering worthless adverts, and some real jobs too.
PS the Guardian is very good too
All in one place? No……….MASHUP!
On the DfT link you provided:
“Sorry, the page you requested was not found”
Mashup is the way!
If we assume there are people who just want to ‘work for government’ there may also be people who specifically want to work for the Home Office or, God help them, Communities and Local Government (it’s great here, honest). And organisations will want to position their ads alongside their recruitment info, competence framework etc. So jobs should be on departmental websites, in a more consistent and reliable way than they are currently.
And they should also be on relevant recruitment sites, wherever the talented people roam. Do we want to recruit people who ‘want to work for government’ or the best people out there? Our approach should be no different than our approach to social media. Take the info to them, not drag them to our websites.
But I agree with the principle of gathering all the govt jobs in one place *as well*, for transparency, convenience – and just plain tidiness.
Proof positive – Tom, you’re almost two years behind the Tories. Still – that’s better than your best mate Gordon, eh?
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2006/12/vote_tory_and_b.html
I’m in total agreement with the RSS chaps(esses) on here!
So, ok, let’s get the corporate garbage out the way. My official line is, “It’s not a heart stopper to build an RSS feed and a centralised aggregator”, http://www.killmurphy.myzen.co.uk took a hooooge 7 hours to build (I funded it myself to prove a point, and it worked), even though the google API was new to us (we found it at 9.30 am that day btw). Facebook is able to accept feeds (eg any RSS you want to think of) but that doesn’t mean that you need a facebook budget (no offence meant FB!). Any gen 2.0 could hack up an aggregator for this (services available at an inflated hourly rate
). So “Big Tom”, you up for the KM team to come in and do a full scoping, procurement, documentation and implementation of this? We do full data path audits too 
KM – “knowledge is a must, innovation is a gift”
work in the government organization is very useful. In this way the job are very secure.
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