Introduction To Scrape Career Data From Company Career Pages
Scraping career data from the web is not new. And whether you are using automated web scrapers, DaaS providers, DIY code, or the plain old copy-paste. Every industry is scraping data from the web. But today, due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. There has been a growing percentage of unemployment. And more people are on the lookout for jobs than ever before in recent history.
Across the globe, multiple industries like hospitality and tourism have taken a big hit. Few like airlines are still in the recovery stage, and with “good-times” nowhere in sight. People have hit the streets to apply in sectors like healthcare, delivery-management, and logistics which have seen growth or are slowly trudging back to normal.
Many big companies are also on the lookout for bright talent that is currently being exposed to the market due to multiple small and promising startups shutting shops. Now the only way these two parties can be connected is through data. This is where you can come in. You can play a vital role today to help both recruiters and applicants during these trying times.
Why Scrape Job Data?
Scraping job data can help you build a business on its own. Whether you want to build a job consultancy service or create an online job portal of your own, you can cover quite a few miles using job data. You can build intelligent systems to match job applicants to job posts, or just build a portal that will help filter down jobs in an easier fashion – the possibilities of services that can be built on top of job data is limitless.
Most job boards scrape data from other sources and have tie-ups with companies that hire through them. This is how websites can add fresh job listings every single day. Some also allow individuals (usual recruiters of companies) to post job postings, for a small fee. One website where you can see such plans would be Linkedin.
Where Should You Scrape Data From?
Deciding where to scrape data from is a tough job in itself, but to break it down in simple terms, you could say that the Job Boards and Career Section of Companies together cover almost all job listings on the internet. Of course, today smaller companies even hire people through social media, but that is usually for regional or local hirings and limited to some specific job-profiles.
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Job Boards
When scraping job data, the best place to start is from job boards and job-aggregators. You can get loads of job listings by targeting just the top ten job boards in each region, and some of the top ones worldwide. Web pages across a single job board are usually similar, so one can use the same code to scrape multiple job listings from a single website, but you will need to handle different job boards since no two job boards will have the same webpage format.
Another thing to remember is that many job boards will show you their listings only when you create an account and login to their website. Now in such a scenario, when you are logged in, you are agreeing to certain terms and conditions. Scraping data that sits behind a login page may land you in trouble. You may also need to check the robot.txt file for each job-board to make sure that they permit web scraping.
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Scraping Data From Company Career Pages
When it comes to company career pages, you may need to set up scraping for separate websites- probably more than hundreds of them. This is because the website of every company’s career page will vary. Also, you will need to scrape the top companies in the sectors you want to target, based on regions. Or if you are going after all types of jobs, then you will need to scrape career sections of almost all the Fortune 500 companies. This big task completed gradually with time. You might also need to take into account booming startups that are hiring aggressively after being able to secure funding. For capturing such information you will need to scrape data from websites that provide the latest news related to startups.
How Do You Scrape Data?
Once you have your goals set. You have to decide how you want to scrape the data. How to process it, and how to plug it into your business’ use case. While you could use a graphical scraping tool. It is unlikely that it will be flexible enough that you can use it on hundreds of websites without a massive amount of effort spent on understanding the software.
On top of this, using proprietary software would mean depending on a third party company for updates, bug fixes, and more. It is recommended that such a large scale solution be built using an open-source language like Python where third-party libraries are easily available (such as BeautifulSoup) that allow simplified scraping of websites, and yet keep space for infinite customizations based on the website that you are scraping.
What Do You Do With So Much Career Data?
When you are scraping such massive amounts of job-data from different websites. You can create a live job feed on your website, and use it to get customers. But the true secrets lie deep within the data. You can put this hoard of data to good use through Data Analytics and Data Sciences. We can create graphs that show market trends related to hiring in different sectors of the industry. You can track how many candidates who use your website to find jobs land one. And further use that data to decide how to list jobs on your website or which ones to list first. Scraping data from career sites is now easier with JobsPikr.
Career Data Scraping – In Conclusion
While we did mention the two ways in which you can start scraping job data from the web and enrich your website or research and recommended the latter. Something to remember is that a scraping task like this, that needs to run on so many websites. It needs to run at periodic intervals to keep the data stream healthy and refreshed. Needs expensive infrastructure, maintenance, and most importantly, a team to build and look after.
Our intelligent job data delivery tool JobsPikr does the same job, without the need for a separate web scraping or infrastructure team at your end. Your business team or research team can directly consume the data and put it to its end-use. Contact us for scraping data from company career pages.
