A job advertising feed, usually delivered as a job XML feed, is a structured file that lists all of an employer’s open roles with standardized fields such as title, location, description, and apply URL. Programmatic job advertising platforms ingest that feed, normalize it, and distribute each job to job boards and aggregators automatically, using it as the single source of truth for what to advertise and where.
If you run recruitment media at any scale, the feed is the foundation everything else sits on. Get it right and distribution, bidding, and reporting all work. Get it wrong and even the smartest bidding strategy advertises the wrong jobs to the wrong audiences.
What a Job XML Feed Actually Is
A job feed is a machine-readable export of your open requisitions. Instead of a person copying a job into a job board form, your applicant tracking system (ATS) or career site publishes a file at a stable URL. That file refreshes on a schedule, so as jobs open and close, the feed reflects the change and downstream systems update accordingly.
XML is the dominant format because it maps cleanly to the parent-child structure of job data: one feed contains many jobs, and each job contains many fields. You will also encounter JSON feeds and, for on-page structured data, schema.org JobPosting markup that search engines read. The underlying idea is the same in every format. A consistent set of fields, one record per job, refreshed regularly.
Why does the feed matter for programmatic advertising?
Programmatic platforms make thousands of automated decisions about which jobs to promote, on which sources, and at what bid. Those decisions are only as good as the data behind them. The feed is that data. It tells the platform which jobs exist, where they are located, and where a candidate should land to apply. Without a clean feed, automation has nothing reliable to act on.
Common Feed Formats and Standard Fields
Most job feeds follow conventions set by the largest aggregators, so a feed built to one clean spec is usually easy to adapt to others. Indeed’s Job Sync XML specification, for example, defines job-level elements including title, date, referencenumber, url, company, city, state, country, postalcode, description, salary, and jobtype. Google for Jobs reads the schema.org JobPosting type, whose recommended and required properties include title, description, datePosted, validThrough, hiringOrganization, and jobLocation.
The fields below appear in nearly every specification and form the practical minimum for programmatic distribution.
| Field | What it holds | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Title | The job title as candidates would search it | Drives matching, search visibility, and relevance |
| Reference number | A unique ID for the job | Deduplicates and tracks each role across sources |
| Location | City, state, country, and postal code | Enables geo-targeting and local search eligibility |
| Description | The full job description | Powers relevance, quality signals, and compliance |
| Apply URL | The destination where candidates apply | Directs traffic and enables conversion tracking |
| Date posted | When the job went live | Signals freshness and supports pacing decisions |
| Company | The hiring organization | Groups jobs and supports branding rules |
| Category and job type | Function, and full or part time | Feeds classification, targeting, and budgeting logic |
A unique reference number deserves special attention. In Indeed’s specification, if the same reference number appears more than once in a feed, only the first instance is used. Duplicate identifiers quietly drop jobs from distribution.
How Programmatic Platforms Ingest and Normalize Feeds
Ingestion is more than downloading a file. A capable platform runs the feed through several stages before a single dollar is spent.
How does normalization work?
Feeds arrive in different shapes. One ATS labels the field city, another bundles the full address into a single string, and a third uses non-standard job type values. Normalization maps all of these variations to a common internal schema so every job is described consistently regardless of source. This is what lets a platform advertise jobs from many different employers and systems side by side.
The platform also validates and enriches records. It checks that required fields are present, standardizes locations to real geographies, classifies jobs into categories, and flags records that fail the rules so they can be fixed rather than published broken.
How do feeds power bidding and distribution?
Once jobs are normalized, the platform decides where each one should run and how hard to bid for it. It distributes jobs across job boards, aggregators, and search and social channels, then adjusts bids based on performance against your goals, whether that is cost per application, cost per hire, or application volume. Because the feed refreshes continuously, spend follows live inventory. When a role fills and drops out of the feed, the platform stops advertising it, so budget is not wasted on jobs that are already closed. This closed loop between live feed data and automated bidding is the core of any programmatic job advertising platform.
Feed Hygiene, Optimization, and Common Problems
The most common performance issues in recruitment advertising are not bidding failures. They are feed failures.
- Broken feeds: The feed URL times out, returns an error, or fails to parse. Distribution stalls for every job at once.
- Stale jobs: Filled roles stay in the feed, so you keep paying for applications to positions that no longer exist and frustrate candidates.
- Missing or thin fields: Absent locations, empty descriptions, or missing apply URLs make jobs ineligible on some sources or push them down in relevance. Indeed notes that jobs without proper location detail can lose organic visibility.
- Duplicate reference numbers: Non-unique IDs cause jobs to be dropped or double counted.
- Encoding errors: Raw HTML entities or unescaped characters can cause a source to reject content or render it incorrectly.
Good hygiene is preventive. Refresh the feed frequently, complete every required field, keep titles clean and searchable, write full descriptions, and monitor for parse errors and stale records. Strong feed data also produces trustworthy reporting, because every application can be traced back to a specific job and source. That is what makes downstream recruitment marketing analytics reliable enough to act on.
FAQ
What is the difference between a job feed and posting jobs manually?
A job feed publishes and updates all of your roles automatically from a single file, while manual posting requires a person to enter each job on each site. Feeds scale to thousands of jobs, refresh in near real time, and remove filled roles automatically. Manual posting does not.
What format should a job feed be in?
XML is the most widely supported format for programmatic distribution and maps naturally to job data. JSON feeds and on-page schema.org JobPosting markup are also used, the latter specifically so search engines like Google for Jobs can read your listings.
What fields are required in a job XML feed?
At minimum, most specifications expect a unique title, location, full description, apply URL, unique reference number, and posting date. Company, category, job type, and salary are strongly recommended because they improve targeting and search eligibility.
Why did my jobs stop appearing after a feed change?
The usual causes are a broken or unreachable feed URL, missing required fields, duplicate reference numbers, or encoding errors that cause a source to reject records. Validate the feed against the target specification and confirm every required field is present and correctly formatted.
How often should a job feed refresh?
Frequently enough to reflect live inventory, ideally at least daily and more often for high-volume employers. Frequent refreshes keep new jobs entering distribution quickly and remove filled roles before budget is wasted.
Can one feed be distributed to multiple job boards?
Yes. A programmatic platform normalizes a single feed into a common schema and then adapts it to the requirements of each destination, so one clean feed can power distribution across many job boards and aggregators at once.
