Y! Pipes + CrazedList = Badass HR Tool

When I found out that hiring managers in my company were going to Craigslist, typing in resume keywords, and then manually searching through gazillions of URLs each morning for potential candidates, I sought to make life easier for them via CrazedList and Y! Pipes.

I went to CrazedList and put in one search term that spanned across all the relevant CraigsList sites (mostly sites in Southern CA, but some were nationally as well). I then put the CrazedList -generated OPML file in FeedMagick2’s “Inspect Pipeline: OPML Reading List Blender” and used the resultant RSS feed as my input value for Y! Pipe’s “Fetch Feed”. Using the “union” and “unique” operators, I could aggregate “Fetch Feed” inputs and parse out dupes.

(I probably spent 4 or 5 hours looking roll my own ghettofabulous ‘OPML to RSS’ parsing solution before throwing in the towel and just googling for an online tool to automagically do it for me. Please post any cool solutions you have in this area! Programming is not my primary skill, so go easy on me…)

Those wanting a “play by play” on how it works, can follow these steps.

1. Go to www.crazedlist.org and enter in your search string and terms (I’ll use “linux” as the search term, check “resumes”, and select “all” for regions)

2. Once we click the orange “get RSS feeds” button, we’ll get something like this.

3. Up near the top, you’ll see something like this

To get the OPML file right-click on this link to Save Link As…. when doing this you’ll be prompted to save a file called index.cgi or index.xml or something, you can change that and name it something like “mysearch.opml” then import that into your favorite RSS reader that supports importing feed list.

4. Open up FeedMagick2’s “OPML Reading List Blender” and enter in the path to the aforementioned OPML file. Convert that to RSS. (This may take a while). Note that path to that RSS feed. It will be your input for Y! Pipes.

5. Log in Y! Pipes, drag in the Fetch Feed module, and copy in that RSS feed. Link that to whatever modules you want, and publish your feed.

(Step 5 may seem unnecessary, but it shortens the path of the RSS feed considerably, making it more accessible to RSS readers which might not take such a long string)