Update 7th October 2009 – The gadget has been updated to v0.3.  All download links have been updated to the new version.

Following the release of the JobServe Labs website, we are planning numerous web apps, downloads and widgets which utilise web service technology.

The initial set of apps and features will be coded around a brand new RESTFul web service for our jobs designed to help you search, and apply for, your next job more quickly than ever before.

Our other initial Labs release, the OpenSearch Search Provider, uses this web service to provide results in the form of search suggestions in the web browser’s search box.

This desktop gadget, however, uses the service in it’s fullest form; allowing for country and location-specific job searching straight from your desktop.

Why use it?

When you’re looking for a job, you want to be able to type your search and get your results as quick as possible. Because this gadget runs discreetly on your desktop you can have it there all the time and just fire a search straight in whenever you feel like it. Also, if you’re on a lower bandwidth connection you’ll get a big performance benefit from this, as the only data downloaded from our servers is for the jobs that match the search that you put in.

So if you’re running Windows Vista or you’re lucky enough to have been playing with the Release Candidate of Windows 7, let’s get started!

Installation instructions

First, Download the gadget and, when prompted, select ‘Open’:

After that, you will be asked to confirm whether or wish to install the Desktop search Gadget, select ‘Install’:

Immediately after doing this, you should see the gadget appear somewhere on your desktop (this screenshot is taken from a Vista machine):

 

That’s it, you’re ready to go!

 

Configuring and executing your search

By default, the gadget is configured to search for jobs in Great Britain, Europe, the Middle East and Africa as a single area (in line with the interactive map that we use on the jobserve.com search results page).  You can change this to any of the other major areas: USA, Canada and Australia & Asia, and indeed any individual country in the world (including the individual countries of the United Kingdom) by opening the settings panel.  As you hover the mouse over the gadget, you will see three little icons appear on the top-right:

Click on the spanner, and you’ll see the settings dialog, on which you can select your preferred country:

 

For ease of access, our four main search areas are grouped together at the top of the list; and the rest of the individual countries are listed separately.  You must select a country, otherwise the settings dialog will display a validation error.

Important note: Your country selection will be remembered until you remove the gadget from the sidebar.  Upon removal from the sidebar the selection will be lost and you will need to reconfigure this if you add it back again at a later date.  Note that if the sidebar is closed (either because you close it deliberately, or because you restart the machine) then the selection will be remembered.

Executing and browsing a Job search

The simplest way to search our jobs is simply to type the kind of job that you want into the ‘Skills’ text box (for example ‘c#’, ‘vb’, ‘sales’, or ‘cleaning’.  Once you do that, you can hit enter to execute the search.  The gadget will show a ‘Please wait’ message whilst connection to the web service is established and the search is executed.  During this time, the search button is hidden.

Since I’m a C# developer, I’m going to search for C#; and my results look like this:

Each page of results is obtained via an Ajax call to a JSON-friendly method on our web service (which supports both XML and JSON request/responses).  The size of the response varies, but 30-40k is a good average.

Each of the Jobs listed can be selected by clicking on it, once you do that, a second window will appear containing the job details:

No extra data is downloaded in order to display this job detail as the gadget pre-fetches it all when it gets the current page of results.

If you like the look of the job, then you can hit either of the ‘Apply for this job now’ links (there’s one at the top and bottom of the job detail), which will fire up your browser and take you to our Apply Online page.

As the UI suggests, the location box is the best place to put a specific location in which you are looking to work, although you can put the location in the skills box instead – the results should be near-identical.

More advanced Job searching

As with many general search engines, the JobServe search engine supports the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT; as well as quoted expressions (e.g. “visual basic” instead of simply visual basic).  You can also use ‘+’ and ‘-‘ to specify that certain words must or must not exist.

So, for example, if I’m not interested in developing on Microsoft Office Sharepoint (MOSS), then I can change my query to ‘C# –MOSS –Sharepoint’ – and the results are as follows:

Equally, if I’m happy to develop in either C# or VB, but still not on MOSS, then I can change my query to ’c# or VB –MOSS –Sharepoint’ and I’ll get different results once more.

Stay tuned

Stay tuned, as we will be enhancing this Gadget very heavily over the coming months.  You can always subscribe to our site Atom feed to stay up to date with all the latest developments on how JobServe is making it easier for you to find, and apply for, your next job.  There’s also a feed dedicated to this particular project.