There has been a lot of news lately about corporate layoffs. It is a tough thing to hear about and obviously much worse if you are affected.
A while back Tim Blaisdell during one of our internal meetings asked about how we could connect folks with jobs better. Out of that came the USAJOBS Report, which connects to the USAJOBS API and finds data jobs posted in the federal government.
One of the features of the report is that if you click the magnifying glass on the top right, you will see a table with hyperlinks. Those hyperlinks go to a customized search that finds a slimmed down Google search of private sector jobs that may interest you. They are also posted within the past three days.
But where did I get the idea for that?
TikTok. Yes, I got it from TikTok.
I saw an article with a TikTok video a while back about how someone used boolean search techniques to wade through Google results and get something that was really helpful. Here is that video:
Using that logic, I wrote Power Query to dynamically calculate three days from today and then passed that to the query string. Every time the report refreshes, the user gets an updated link. Works really well.
One thing I am working on is this: How to scrape the results themselves, at least just the first page, and export them. I was trying to do this in Power BI, but as it stands right now you can’t scrape a webpage with dynamic parameters (as far as I know). So, I decided to give Python a shot.
I am still working on that one, but after finagling with a Python tutorial online, I am much closer. Here is the GitHub gist. You should be able to run this for free in Google Colab:
