Job Page – reloaded

Since 3 years digital-geography.com provides a nice page for your job search in the fields of GIS and Geosciences. As most of our visitors are young professionals, which are not necessarily interested in a job near their home, we started this job page with a webmap from the very beginning. Now we made a big rework of the side.

The Early Beginning

Just have a look at this old side:

The old pages where based on a single map for each week and was implemented using openlayers. This was every time just a weekly snapshot and based on manual research. Then we moved on to cartodb:

Well, cartodb just served as a JSON backend and did well that way. But we pasted every job we found by hand into each cell those days. Additionally we used cartodb as geocoder as well. Unfortunately cartodb limited geocoding shortly after and we needed an update…

The Google Times

In 2014 we started to think about an online form, so everyone can post a job offer on digital-geography.com for free and we would not have been the only “data entry slaves”. This worked with a google spreadsheet backend and a google based geocoder in the spreadsheet. This was great as well but ended up in being the only “data entry slave” for us. Until now I never understood, why only 14 jobs were posted by visitors/companies using this form?

Here Comes Indeed

Indeed aggregates job listings from thousands of websites, including job boards, staffing firms, associations, and company career pages. Additionally it offers an API for querying jobs in more several countries. Our current map uses this API to fetch a JSON and parse this to geoJSON. Furthermore we fill a list in a slider in the webmap. The advantages of this solution:

• free keyword search
• full support of the API
• all countries via a dropdown
• radius/city search
• see the results on a glimpse via the map! (or do you know where Castrop-Rauxel is located in Germany?)

Especially the last point is crucial in most radius-based searches. They only take the straight line distance as reference. But take a look at a medium sized city like Berlin: Most jobs are in the city and this would result in a 1 hour journey each direction for a commuter… But with a map and the knowledge about your area you can easily decide, whether the employer has an easy-to-reach location or not. And let’s be honest: 15km through a city like Berlin, Boston or New York is not comparable with a 30km drive through Brandenburg or Oregon when it comes to commuting by car. So check out or new map: