Indeed is a site for job searching which pools results aggregated from company sites and job boards such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. The Indeed solution is a very attractive one because it allows job searchers to visit a single site and query across thousands of job sources.
Fortunately for developers, Indeed has a suite of tools available to the public including a web service API.

In order to use Indeed’s web services you’ll need to sign up for a developer account and receive an Indeed API Key. Alternatively, you could use Indeed’s OpenSearch offering but we’ll save that for another article.

If told to do so, Indeed can optionally pass latitude and longitude coordinates; once we have that information it becomes a simple exercise to map the coordinates using the Google Maps API.

The result is a surprisingly useful display of information with nearly endless possibilities (See the Demo here). You might want to group locations together in a single map based on proximity or you might choose to display a single larger map with an AJAX call only when each job is clicked.

In order to display Google Maps, you’ll need to sign up for the API by submitting the URL (ie. http://i.ndustrio.us) from where you’ll be generating Map calls.

Building the Indeed Search String

Here’s the basic Indeed Search String:

http://api.indeed.com/apisearch?q=Pepperdine&l=CA
&format=xml&key=xyz

In addition to the “what” and “where” parameters, we’ll want to retrieve Read More »