Finding work is tough—especially for freelance workers. You revise and send out your resume on an almost daily basis, you visit the same old job sites, and you conduct the same searches in the hope that someone, somewhere, is willing to offer you a gig in your field of expertise.

Even when you have work, you're always searching for the next opportunity. But you can make the search a lot simpler and more effective by using an RSS client.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and most websites use it to provide a feed of the most recent stories. You can check out MakeUseOf's feed here. You'll see that it contains the most recent article titles, their date, a short summary, and a link to the main article on the main website.

While MakeUseOf only provides short stubs, some other sites provide the full text of the article. Many job sites provide full text articles, and any subreddit can also output an RSS feed. Even search results can be presented this way.

What this means for you is that instead of wasting time with your daily routine of visiting job boards, checking subreddits, and running searches, you can simply click a button, and all of this information will come to you.

Several years ago, RSS used to be a big deal on the internet, and even Google used to have its own specialized RSS client. These days, there are few RSS clients actively maintained, and in our opinion, the best of these is QuiteRSS—thanks to its excellent and easy-to-use filtering system.

rss feeds with a lot of 'hire me' posts and other irelevancies

As you'll see, an awful lot of what your RSS client pulls from the internet will be junk. It will be completely irrelevant to your field, or will be the desperate virtual cries of other freelancers calling for work into the uncaring void of the internet. You want to silence those hopeless pleas, and QuiteRSS will help you do just that. QuiteRSS is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD.

Almost every website has an RSS feed. Go to the site you usually check for jobs, and there may be an RSS icon in the social media section. Failing that, add /feed after the base URL. If that doesn't work, try /rss or /rss.xml.

muo homepage with the social menu open with cursor over the RSS icon

In the event that neither of these addresses yield a valid RSS feed, right-click on the website's homepage, then click View age Source. Use Ctrl + F to search for the terms, "feed", "rss", "atom", or "xml". A few handy RSS feed links for jobseekers in the freelance writing field are: Writejobs, Freelance Writing Jobs, and ProBlogger.

Reddit is also a fantastic source of work for freelancers and job hunters in every field. You're probably already aware of subreddits such as r/forhire, r/hireawriter, and r/ProgrammingJobs. You can create an RSS feed of any subreddit by adding .rss to the URL. For instance, the RSS feed for r/forhire can be accessed at https://www.reddit.com/r/forhire.rss.

If you don't already have go-to places to look for work, read our guide to unique and niche job boards to help to find the perfect workplace.

Think of the job-related searches you do on a regular basis. These are probably along the lines of "programmers wanted", "hiring writers", or "looking for artists". You use these terms because they are what companies are likely to put on their sites when looking for new recruits.

There are dozens of variations for each search you do, and typing them into a search engine can wear out both fingers and soul—you could be spending that time building a stronger resume.

bing job search results as RSS feeds

Bing is the only major search engine that will render your search results as an RSS feed. Just type a query into Bing, hit search, then when the results page appears, copy the URL from the URL bar and paste it to QuiteRSS. This will work as a feed with the application.

After installing QuiteRSS, you'll be greeted with news from the QuiteRSS feed. These articles are irrelevant to your job search, and you can safely ignore them.

To add your own feed to QuiteRSS, click the big, green + icon in the top left of the screen, and a new window will pop up, prompting you to create a new feed. Paste the URL into the box, and click Next. You will be asked to choose a displayed name for the feed and to confirm its location. Once you have done this, click finish.

Two windows, both titled Create A new Feed

Repeat the process for all of your RSS feeds, and once you have finished, click the orange refresh button near the left of the top bar.

Under Categories, click Unread, and your QuiteRSS window will immediately fill with job-related articles. Clicking on one will open the QuiteRSS browser in the bottom half of the screen, allowing you to read the original article.

quiterss showing results for job related feeds

Keeping Unwanted Articles Out of Your Job Feed

You will have immediately noticed that your screen contains hundreds of posts you don't want to read. These will be from other, more desperate jobseekers, screaming "Hire Me!"; for jobs which are not in your field; or plain old spam.

You can employ QuiteRSS's excellent filters to keep the dross to a minimum. Identify words common to posts you do not want to see. These will probably include "for hire" or "hire me". If you're a writer, you will want to exclude terms relating to programming, cleaning, security, or so on.

Click on the menu button at the extreme top left of the screen, then select Tools, followed by News Filters. In the next window, click on New Filter. You will be asked to create a name for the filter and the conditions for which it will apply.

quiterss menus leading to news filters label

Once you are satisfied, check the feeds to which the filter will be applied. Articles that match the specified criteria will be marked as read, and will not appear in main the RSS feed.

Windows showing quiterss filters and criteria above the main app screen

Using an RSS client such as QuiteRSS to help you search for jobs saves time and effort. Use that saved time to work more effectively in the job you have and take care of your resume. Maybe you could even learn a new skill.