Scraping-Free Alerts: Tracking Government Job Notices with RSS and a Spreadsheet

Most government recruitment sites in India don't offer an API, and scraping them is fragile and often against their terms. Here is a low-tech setup that works for a personal job-alert pipeline.

1. Pick sources that publish feeds

Many aggregators and some official portals expose RSS or Atom. Collect the feed URLs in one list.

2. Pull feeds into a spreadsheet

Google Sheets' IMPORTFEED function pulls the latest items into rows:

=IMPORTFEED("https://example.org/feed", "items title", FALSE, 20)

3. Filter by keyword

Use FILTER with REGEXMATCH to keep only rows matching terms like "engineer", "apprentice" or your state:

=FILTER(A2:B, REGEXMATCH(LOWER(A2:A), "apprentice|junior engineer"))

4. Add a closing-date column by hand

Feeds rarely include the last date. Add it when you open the official notice. Conditional formatting can turn rows red seven days before the deadline.

5. Notifications

Sheets can email you on change via Tools > Notification settings.

For a human-curated source to cross-check, Govtpvt keeps a running list of Sarkari job notifications, each linked to the official PDF.