Vacancies

The Open Data Service imports advertised vacancy information from the central recruitment portal at https://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk/. If you represent a college or other affiliated institution and want your vacancies included, please see Adding your vacancies to the dataset.

Note

Want to get started quickly?

We’ve written an example page showing how to include a vacancy feed using jQuery and AJAX. You’ll need to change the references to 31337175 to the OxPoints ID for your unit, which you can find from the main vacancies feeds page.

Feeds

There are vacancy feeds for each unit at https://data.ox.ac.uk/feeds/vacancies/.

Feeds are available as Atom, RSS, RDF, XML and JSON. The latter three include opening and closing dates, HTML and plain text descriptions, and details about salary, contact, relevant unit and the building at which the job is based. The RSS and Atom feeds only include a description, title, and a link.

Here’s an example entry in an XML feed:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<vacancies>
  <vacancy id="105184">
    <uri>https://data.ox.ac.uk/id/vacancy/105184</uri>
    <url>https://data.ox.ac.uk/doc/vacancy/105184</url>
    <webpage>https://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk/pls/hrisliverecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.display_form?p_display_in_irish=N&amp;p_company=10&amp;p_refresh_search=Y&amp;p_process_type=&amp;p_recruitment_id=105184&amp;p_form_profile_detail=&amp;p_display_apply_ind=Y&amp;p_internal_external=E&amp;p_applicant_no=</webpage>
    <label>Head of DARS Support Centre</label>
    <opens>2012-11-07T10:14:50+00:00</opens>
    <closes>2012-12-05T12:00:00+00:00</closes>
    <location>Development Office/IT Services, University Offices/Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford</location>
    <description format="application/xhtml+xml">&lt;div&gt;
Live since 2009 and with a growing number of participants, the Development and Alumni Relations System for the collegiate University is critical to the next phase of Oxford&amp;#8217;s Campaign, which has an increased goal of &amp;#163;3bn, with over &amp;#163;1.4bn raised in new pledges and gifts since 2004. Envisioned to be both internally and externally recognised as the most advanced Higher Education fundraising system in Europe, DARS utilises Blackbaud CRM software and is a comprehensive tool for development and alumni relations professionals across the University, Colleges and Departments.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;This role will manage and have day-to-day operational responsibility for the DARS Support Centre, which incorporates more than twenty staff across the Development Office, Alumni Office and IT Services.  Its five teams provide functional, process and data, data migration, website and training support to promote, facilitate and drive the significant benefits for fundraising and alumni relations activity that can be achieved from a smarter collaborative approach to technology and to data for the collegiate University and for Oxonians and donors worldwide.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;This is an excellent opportunity for someone with a deep and broad understanding of relationship management business processes, backed with proven and significant experience working with and improving business systems in a complex and diverse organisation.  Exceptional negotiation and resource-planning skills are essential, coupled with the knowledge, astuteness and ability to achieve wide consensus when making decisions.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;Only applications received before 12.00 noon on 5 December 2012 can be considered. You will be required to upload a letter of application as part of your online application.  Interviews are currently scheduled to take place on Tuesday 11 December 2012.  It is anticipated that second interviews will take place on the afternoon of Monday 17 December 2012.
&lt;/div&gt;
</description>
    <description format="text/plain">Live since 2009 and with a growing number of participants, the Development and Alumni Relations System for the collegiate University is critical to the next phase of Oxford’s Campaign, which has an increased goal of £3bn, with over £1.4bn raised in new pledges and gifts since 2004. Envisioned to be both internally and externally recognised as the most advanced Higher Education fundraising system in Europe, DARS utilises Blackbaud CRM software and is a comprehensive tool for development and alumni relations professionals across the University, Colleges and Departments.

This role will manage and have day-to-day operational responsibility for the DARS Support Centre, which incorporates more than twenty staff across the Development Office, Alumni Office and IT Services.  Its five teams provide functional, process and data, data migration, website and training support to promote, facilitate and drive the significant benefits for fundraising and alumni relations activity that can be achieved from a smarter collaborative approach to technology and to data for the collegiate University and for Oxonians and donors worldwide.

This is an excellent opportunity for someone with a deep and broad understanding of relationship management business processes, backed with proven and significant experience working with and improving business systems in a complex and diverse organisation.  Exceptional negotiation and resource-planning skills are essential, coupled with the knowledge, astuteness and ability to achieve wide consensus when making decisions.

Only applications received before 12.00 noon on 5 December 2012 can be considered. You will be required to upload a letter of application as part of your online application.  Interviews are currently scheduled to take place on Tuesday 11 December 2012.  It is anticipated that second interviews will take place on the afternoon of Monday 17 December 2012.</description>
    <organizationPart>
      <uri>http://oxpoints.oucs.ox.ac.uk/id/31337175</uri>
      <url>https://data.ox.ac.uk/doc:oxpoints/31337175</url>
      <webpage>http://www.it.ox.ac.uk/</webpage>
      <label>IT Services</label>
      <address>
        <street-address>16 Wellington Square</street-address>
        <locality>Oxford</locality>
        <postal-code>OX1 2HY</postal-code>
      </address>
    </organizationPart>
    <basedNear>
      <uri>http://oxpoints.oucs.ox.ac.uk/id/23233672</uri>
      <url>http://oxpoints.oucs.ox.ac.uk/id/23233672</url>
      <webpage>None</webpage>
      <label>Beaver House</label>
      <address>
        <street-address>23-38 Hythe Bridge Street</street-address>
        <locality>Oxford</locality>
        <postal-code>OX1 2EP</postal-code>
      </address>
      <location>
        <lat>51.753304</lat>
        <long>-1.266764</long>
      </location>
    </basedNear>
    <salary>
      <label>Grade 9: £42,883 to £49,689, with discretionary range to £54,283</label>
      <lower>42883</lower>
      <upper>54283</upper>
      <currency>GBP</currency>
    </salary>
    <contact>
      <label>Personnel Assistant</label>
      <email>recruitment@admin.ox.ac.uk</email>
    </contact>
  </vacancy></vacancies>

Data

The data is updated every fifteen minutes between 7AM and 6PM weekdays, from an XML feed exposed by the recruitment site.

Data quality

There doesn’t seem to be much input validation behind the scenes in the source system, so be wary of making assumptions about the data. In particular:

  • The HTML in the descriptions is not always well-formed. In these cases there will be a (malformed) HTML description, but no plain-text description.
  • Some vacancies don’t have closing dates listed. You should assume these are still open. The Temporary Staffing Service (TSS) vacancies don’t have closing dates, as people are always invited to apply.
  • Some files (linked using foaf:page) don’t have titles (dcterms:title).
  • Not all contact details have label data. You shoud be able to handle this element being missing.

Limitations

At the moment the dataset doesn’t include joint academic appointments listed at http://www.ox.ac.uk/about_the_university/jobs/academic/, or college-only vacancies.

The vacancies are matched to departments based on the free-text location element just under the job title on recruit.ox. Occasionally these get mismatched due to a typo, or because it wasn’t quite specific enough (e.g. when two units occupy the same building and only the building name has been given).

If you notice that a job hasn’t appeared, search for the vacancy ID at https://data.ox.ac.uk/search/ to make sure it’s been ingested. If it has — and has been matched wrongly — contact opendata@it.ox.ac.uk to get it fixed.

Examples of this dataset in use

A number of departments are currently using vacancy feeds:

Vacancies are also syndicated to the following job sites:

  • Naturejobs <http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/jobs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=oxford+university&where=&commit=Find+Jobs>, but only those tagged with “naturejobs” (case-insensitive) in the recruitment system.
  • Indeed
  • Jobrapido
  • Simply Hired

Adding your vacancies to the dataset

If you have vacancy data in a structured format that isn’t in the recruit.ox dataset, we’d be very interested in including them. We’d then provide combined feeds and automatically syndicate your vacancy information to external sites.

Examples of structured formats include:

  • An RSS feed
  • A SharePoint list
  • A web page generated from a data source in a structured way

If you don’t have anything structured, we’d be happy to help you set up a SharePoint list to capture the required information.

At a minimum, we’d like the following fields:

  • Job title
  • Job description or advertisement text (plain text or HTML)
  • A URL for a page with more information
  • Salary information (even if just “Competitive salary” for some vacancies)
  • Closing date and time
  • Contact name (a person, or e.g. “Recruitment team”)
  • Some contact method (e.g. e-mail, phone)
  • Organisation offering the role
  • The place at which the vacancy is based

Anything else you feel is relevant could also be included.

To find out more, or to express your interest, please contact the Open Data Team at opendata@it.ox.ac.uk.

Source code

The source for ingesting vacancy information from https://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk/ is available in GitHub.

dataox.vacancy.transform.vacancy
RetrieveVacancies.execute is executed periodically by the update framework.
dataox.vacancy.scraper.recruitox
Scrapes the vacancy information out of https://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk/ by crawling the list of vacancies for vacancy IDs, and then retrieving individual pages. Data are then stored in a Django model.
dataox.vacancy.models
Vacancy is the main model, and has a triples() method for generating the RDF. Document records details of documents attached to vacancies.

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