Almost everyone is searching for better job opportunities. Checking companies doing recruitments, to find a better position with a good salary. According to research, more than 50% of Americans use the internet for job search. More than 40% have even applied for jobs using online services.

This clearly proves that the online job search market has expanded now. The ones who manage to keep track of updated credible job posts can get a lot of traffic. Let’s discuss what is job scraping and how it is done.

What is Job Scraping?

Job Scraping is a process of gathering job vacancies of various companies. There are lots of social media platforms and websites that post employment opportunities. Job Boards; LinkedIn, Facebook, Indeed, Craigslist, Jobster, SimplyHired, etc. 

According to a report, presently, there are 16 million job postings available online. Scraping job postings has become essential now. Because everyone is in search of better opportunities. Bots or crawlers can scrape various job sites and extract job opportunities data in a format:

• Job Title
• Company/Organization name
• Job Description
• Job Posting Date – Last date for applying
• Job Location
• Job Type (full-time, part-time, or remote)
• Salary Range

Also, check our article on web scraping legal issues!

Benefits of Job Scraping

Job scraping is an important type of web scraping. People are keeping an eye on different opportunities to be better. Whereas companies make sure that the vacancy becomes word of the mouth, so they don’t miss any good talent. 

Some benefits of Job Scraping are:

Desired Salary  

Salary is the basic motivation an employee works hard for. It’s important for both, the company and the person looking for jobs. Recruiters rely on job scraping data for deciding a salary for a position. As a recruiter, you wouldn’t want to pay a much higher salary than the industry. Neither would you offer a lower salary than your competitors and lose good talent because of a bad price. 

Using this data, your company can compare salaries with the market. It will help maintain a balance between company costs and hiring good talent. 

Lead Generation 

Posting a list of jobs in different niches will bring more traffic to a website. Whether you are good at graphics designing or offering management skills. Job scraping platforms like Indeed will help you find companies hiring people in your field. Tap the right company and right job to make it yours.   

The New Trends

With this data, you will always have up-to-date and relevant information on the market. Knowing and keeping up with the Industry trends is very important for every business. Corporate policies or salaries or work requirements change with time. So it’s better to stay updated with the happenings in the market.

Stay Competitive

The key goal of online job boards is to list job postings to attract new visitors. Job boards need to be organized and consistent with job opportunities data. This will ensure that the visitor will return looking for more job advertisements. They find you reliable enough for finding job opportunities.

Challenges for scraping Job Postings – Outsource It

Gathering Data from Multiple Sources

First, you need to think about where to extract job data from.

•  You might look at job aggregator sites like LinkedIn, Monster, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc.  
• Every company has a section known as Career on its website. You will have to scrape those career pages almost every day to stay updated with new vacancies.

High costs

Old job postings can call for a problem. The person who applies for the job and gets to know the position is already filled. He would never come back to that job board again. You need to stay updated, consistent,, and reliable with job postings. You need to spend on web crawlers. 

Every company has its own website. The company website career section is easy to scrape. Every website has its own interface so each website will need a different web crawler. The upfront cost is high. Also, make sure that the web crawler is updated with changes in the website interface. Add the cost of hiring a developer for in-house maintenance of the scraping system too.

Technique against blocked Job Scraping

You might need a web scraper to extract data from websites for you. Big companies’ portals might be tricky to scrape. They all use anti-scraping techniques to save their website from uncontrolled visits. Automated web crawlers face IP blocks, captchas, suspicious browsing activities, honeypot traps, etc. 

Ya, there is always a way to bypass these anti-scraping techniques.

Perks of Outsourcing a Web Scraping Service

A better option is that you outsource the Web Scraping Service. It will be very beneficial

• Time Saver: Since the company has outsourced job scraping. The company can use time wisely and focus on more important business operations.
  
• Fast and consistent: A web scraping service provider will complete the work, within a given deadline. If you have a job board website, data is required to be scraped almost every day.
  
• Cost Efficient: Getting a web scraping service outsourced, you will get your data at a fixed price. Whereas if you have your own data crawling tools or software. You would also have to pay for its unexpected maintenance.
  
• Niche data: It’s very difficult to narrow down a job post information all by yourself. With a web scraping service, there is a whole team working to extract data according to your needs.

Conclusion

Job scraping is important for both, employers and employees. Extracting job data provides market insights that help you offer a competitive salary. To understand what employees want and stay updated with growth in the job market. This data helps a company stay competitive and find good talent.

The online job repository went through a major growth during the Covid-19 outbreak. Companies are working hard to explore ways to find job data and expand their business. One of the most profitable ways to extract job data is by choosing a web scraping service. It will save both your time and money. You can also have your own job scraping infrastructure. If things are set up rightly, it can be done in the same price range.