[UPDATE] I just was told that the new features on EJM actually allow you to download an XLS spreadsheet of the job listings on EJM. This is accessible when you login to myeconjobmarket.org and is part of their new AIMS (Application and Interview Management System).

I wanted to describe a little helper I am using to help refine the places I want to apply at since I am going to be on the Economics Job Market this year.

The two main websites were job openings are advertised are:

• EconJobMarket
• Job Openings for Economists

Now JOE has a really nice feature where you can download simply all job openings into a nice spreadsheet. This allows you to browse through and refine your search. Econ Job Market does not have such a feature.

The Listing page is quite annoying…

If you want more details for a job opening, such as a description of the fields and application requirements, you will have to click on “more info…”. In the JOE spreadsheet, you have all that information at once.

I wanted to create a JOE like spreadsheet using the openings from EJM. Some of which, of course, do overlap. But for some reason, some jobs are only on EJM but not on JOE.

So how can we use R to help us do that?

The first thing I wanted to do is get the simple listings on the main application page from EJM as a spreadsheet. You can simply download the main listings file and extract the pieces of information. Most important is the “posid” field, which is the position ID contained in the EJM URL. This will give you a direct link to the HTML page of the job opening and it also tells you whether you can apply through EJM.

This leaves you with a listing of EJM links to jobs, their position ID and the EJM Application Link in case the Job Opening accepts applications through EJM. Now you can proceed to simply download all the HTML files using a batch downloader such as DownThemAll. If you want to do that, you can print out a list:

cat(EJM$url, sep="\n")

and enter them into Down Them All. Alternatively you can iterate through the list of links and send HTTP queries to get the details from each job separately. This is part of the next lines of code:

This renders us with a nice csv that we can browse quickly through in Excel…for convenience you can download the listings as of 23-10-2014 below. Good luck for your applications!

econjobmarket-23-10-2014