There’s few things more disheartening for students then realising they’ve just missed the application window for one of their favourite employers. Final year students have a multitude of competing priorities and unfortunately even the best students still miss application deadlines for no other reason than they forgot.
One of the best ways you can support your students is to set up automate alert emails that inform them when upcoming career opportunities of interest to them are about to close.
Our research shows that email is the preferred method for job alert updates according to current students.
Introducing RSS feeds
If you have a Prosple career directory set up for your institution and access to your student bulk email program, then you can create automate opportunity alerts for all your students.
Prosple career directories have the capability to expose RSS feeds of upcoming career opportunities (e.g. graduate jobs, internships, work integrated learning). An RSS feed is a basic protocol for conveying information between two sources, for example between your career directory and your student bulk email software.
Creating your own RSS feed
The easiest way to think about how RSS feeds work for Prosple career directories is to start by navigating to the /search-jobs page of your career directory. I’ll use GradAustralia as an example here and navigate to: https://gradaustralia.com.au/search-jobs
To create an RSS feed of the content on this search page, you simply need to replace the ‘search-jobs‘ section of the url with ‘rss?‘
For example, to generate an RSS feed of all opportunities in the GradAustralia career directory, we can simply use: https://gradaustralia.com.au/rss?
Let’s say we now want to create an RSS feed for all opportunities open to students with Business & Management degree. We can simply check the corresponding filter on the left-hand menu and then use the corresponding url to generate the rss feed.
The rss feed is therefore: https://gradaustralia.com.au/rss?&study_field_tids=478&start=0&default=1
You should be able to replicate these on your institutions career directory, provided RSS feeds have been switched on for your site (contact your Prosple account manager if it hasn’t). RSS feeds won’t work for all filter combinations, but you should be able to create them for study field, sector, opportunity type and location.
You can use this spreadsheet (make a copy) to create the RSS urls you’d like to use in your email campaigns.
Using RSS feeds in an email campaign
The next step is to integrate the RSS feeds you’ve created into an RSS triggered email campaign within your student email program. This feature is supported by most modern email marketing platforms. The links to the respective instruction pages on some of these platforms are here:
At Prosple, we use ActiveCampaign to power our job alert emails, so we’ll step through that example here. The underlying logic should be the same regardless of the platform.
In this example, we’ll set up automated job alerts for students enrolled in accounting degrees.
First, create a new RSS Triggered campaign:
Next, select the list you want these job alerts to go to. This will depend on your email platform is set up. For us, we have a list dedicated to accounting and advisory students.
Now we can start designing our email.
The most important part here is to make sure we’ve included an RSS list of all jobs open to accounting students in the body of the email. You can see how this is configured within ActiveCampaign here:
Once the designs are finished, we can schedule this email for sending. In our example below, we’ve set the email to send each week only if there are new opportunities.
That’s it! Your accounting students will now receive weekly updates about all new career opportunities open to them on your career directory. Setting this up will dramatically increase engagement on your career directory and improve employment outcomes for your students.
If your institutions’ bulk email system does not support RSS feeds or you‘d like this set up for you, please get in touch with your account manager. We offer this as a service for our enterprise partners.