Hey all. I'm looking for some advice on a blogging idea that I'm looking into. I want to start collecting job listings in blue companies, and presenting them for general consumption. The idea would be to connect Blue People (Orangey-blue People for now) with jobs where they can feel like they are a part of something good, either through the work itself, or by contributing to the success of a good corporate citizen. I'm looking for help / suggestions / advice in two specific areas: copyright and technical suggestions.
Any time I get depressed about working in a so-so job for a VERY republican company, I daydream about going to work for some fabulously progressive organization doing work that I can really be proud of. Of course in this fantasy world, this job is located in walking distance to home and my kids' school, pays 40 hour wages for a 30 hr work week, 5 wks vacation etc etc. Oh well. What I'm looking to do is to start blogging on job opportunities in progressive organizations, nonprofits, and blue companies. In the for-profit sector, I'll be relying heavily on
BuyBlue.com's excellent ratings.
Here are the areas where I'm looking for advice or suggestions:
1. Copyright - From what I've been able to dig up, I don't really see much problem with collecting job postings, primarily from company websites, and summarizing / linking to them. Here's my reasoning, based on the "copyright for dummies" sources I was able to turn up:
- The purpose is non-commercial, and I would argue, educational (maybe News Reporting?) in nature.
- The copyrighted work is of a nature that it is publicly available information which the companies are paying to disseminate to the public
- I won't be copying web pages whole, but either copy/pasting or summarizing job descriptions and other info, and I'll be linking back to the jobs pages where they were originally published.
- The effect of my use would be to widen the applicant pool available for a given position. (could be argued that's not necessarily a good thing, but I think that's stretching it.
Basically, I think I'm pretty well in the clear on this, but wanted to run it by the collective intelligence of the dKos community. Is my reasoning pretty sound here? Anyone with any experience in the area care to comment? I also asked my favorite HR consultant for an opinion, and her response was essentially "free postings? Hell YES, more resumes to wade through? bring it on, baby!"
2. Tech - I hate working inefficiently. A lot. If there's going to be an automated way that I can capture updates to company job postings easily, I'm all for it. I suspect however, that with every individual company's site being a bit different, that automated approaches just won't work. BUT, since dKos has more than it's fair share of resident geniuses, and because I'm at least as prone to ignoring the obvious as the next guy, I figured I'd throw this part out to you all, and see if anyone had any suggestions. Along with this, I'm also looking for ways of searching Monster and the other commercial job boards for jobs at a list of companies - they don't seem to have that functionality built in. A Google domain-specific search turns up the Monster pages for each of a group of companies, so that's a start. Maybe I'll set up a tab group (using MyIE2 = pretend firefox until I move to a new machine) with each of those pages, and work from there. All suggestions appreciated. If people find it useful, I could see it turning into something along the lines of Planetizen, but that's a long way off.
Finally, if anyone else is interested in helping out with the heavy lifting of searching for jobs and diarying on them, we could consider doing a group screen name here to get things started. Of course, if Kossacks are either looking for work or looking to hire, it'd be a great place to look as well. But then again, do you really want some dKos (crack for liberals) addict who spends their workday arguing with Armando (not that I've ever seen anyone last that long) running your nukular power plant?