TN Jobs now tells you about the jobs near you

In September I wrote about tnjobs.site, a job site that updates itself every day. That post was about the website. This one is about the people using it and the TN Jobs app on Android, because what they want to know is always the same: is there anything new near me, and can I still apply?

This month both questions got proper answers.

Only jobs you can still apply for

Most listings close within three weeks. The app was still showing every job we had ever collected, nearly 13,000 by then, in no particular order, when only about 2,500 were open. You could scroll for ten minutes and find nothing you could apply to.

Now every list in the app shows open jobs only, newest first, and each job knows how many days it has left. Search also finds a job the day it arrives. Before, the newest listings stayed out of search until a background step had processed them, which hid exactly the jobs people were looking for.

One alert a day, about jobs that fit

The first version of alerts told everyone about everything. When the day's jobs arrived, every phone buzzed with “100 New Jobs Added”, and a minute later with “69 New Jobs Added”. That is noise, not an alert.

Now the app waits until the day's jobs have all come in, then sends each person one message:

• If you have set a sector and a district in your profile, you hear only about jobs that match both, in one message, with the first two named.
• If you have not, you get one summary of the day by district, with a nudge to fill in your profile.
• If nothing matches, your phone stays quiet that day.

The profile fields are free text, so the matching had to be forgiving. Trichy finds Tiruchirappalli, Kovai finds Coimbatore, and IT finds IT & Software without also matching Hospitality.

Where does Chennai end?

Listings name a place, not a district. They say Saint Thomas Mount, Vijayapuri or Avinashi, and an alert for Erode has to know that Vijayapuri is in Erode.

I did not have to draw that map. The job board we collect from already groups its areas into districts on its own pages, and using its grouping placed 99.9% of our jobs in one of Tamil Nadu's 38 districts or Puducherry. Where a name exists in two districts, like Attur, I checked real listings before deciding. The few that could not be settled were left alone rather than guessed.

Chennai needed one more decision. Its suburbs are filed under the districts around it: Ambattur under Tiruvallur, Alandur under Kanchipuram, Tambaram under Chengalpattu. Nobody looking for work in Chennai thinks of Tambaram as somewhere else.

One lesson from that: the map service I used to measure distances put one of the towns on a road in Adyar. The real town is near Tiruttani, nowhere near the city. I checked every place on the list by hand after that.

A page for every job

Until last week the site showed jobs in lists, and every View & Apply button sent you off to the original listing. Now each open job has its own page on tnjobs.site: what it pays, the experience and qualification it asks for when the listing gives them, how many days are left, other jobs nearby, and a button to apply on the original listing.

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The pages are written in the format Google's job search reads, so they can appear there. Whether and when Google shows them is up to Google. For now they are live, listed in the site's sitemap, and every city and sector page links to them. When a job closes, its page says so and points to open jobs nearby.

What it adds up to

None of this is a new feature you would notice on its own. Together it means that someone in Madurai who sets Driver and Madurai once gets one message on the days there is something for them, opens a page that tells them what it pays and how long they have, and never scrolls past a job that closed last week.

The TN Jobs app was built by Hafeez on the Digitalgrub team. It is free on Google Play.