The Job Industry has never been going through times as turbulent as these. With new roles coming up to handle the different positions that have opened up based on customer requirements, job seekers either need to skill up, or switch roles. Web scraping job feed has been a requirement for most job agencies, but today it is more important than ever before since almost all job listings are directly being posted online, across multiple portals (for better reach). Scraping Data from Job Portal is on an increase and with high demand. Let us take a look at how it is done.
Scraping Data From Job Portal – What Are Your Options?
As the owner of a job-portal, or job-agency, you would want to make the most of the current situation and scrape more and more jobs and keep your feed updated to get more applicants on your website and also to drive conversions. But what are your options here?
Paid Web Scraping Tools
Multiple paid web scraping tools are present in the market today. These tools are available at different prices, and some are even free, but come with limited functionalities. They usually require no coding knowledge and can be learned in a matter of days. The problem with these tools is that they all come with some constraints and in case your company needs to shift from one tool to another due to cost restraints, you will have to learn the new tool all over again.
Coding Your Solutions
Coding your web scraping solution using an open-source language like Python which has loads of third party packages and a huge developer base, is the best idea. However, if you are starting from scratch- that is if you have no previous coding or scraping experience, the learning curve can be rather steep. Also, web scraping is something that one gets better at after scraping hundreds of different types of websites. Scraping data from a single job portal may be a very different task compared to scraping data from ten, since all ten may come with different user interfaces, some may allow you to access data once you log in, and some may even make you solve a captcha.
DaaS Providers
This is the last and easiest solution for companies that want to set up shop fast, and need their data in a plug and play format, so there is no delay in the business. Our team at PromptCloud provides a fully automated job feed for your business through our tool called JobsPikr. Such an automated tool would mean all you need to provide are your requirements and you will be able to use the data feed that is shared with you for your business. When using a DaaS like ours you need not worry about a learning curve or a separate team for infra and maintenance. You give the requirements and you get the data- that is how easy DaaS makes scraping data from Job Portals.
Scraping Data From Job Portal Like Indeed?
But suppose you want to scrape data yourself for a DIY project. How easy or difficult would it be to say scrape data from a website like Indeed? Well, you can refer to the code below.
We are using our usual combination of Request and BeautifulSoup, to capture the HTML content and then convert it to a BeautifulSoup object to parse through it easily and extract the data points.
When you run the code, you will be asked 3 questions, to which we provided these answers as you can see below-
Once the code execution is complete. It will ask you to check the JSON file that it has produced as output. The JSON will contain a few job listings based on the values that you provided earlier. Our values produced a lot of job listings. But we truncated it to just 3 to show you how it worked.
If you go through the output JSON, you can see that there is a block for each job listing, and each of these blocks contains certain data points. The data points that we have extracted are-
- Company name
- Date
- Details
- Location
- Rating
- Summary
- Title
- Url
Of these, we have stripped the details section to just the first 100 characters, but based on your usage you can extract the entire details or some other specific number of characters or words.
Scraping Data From Job Portal – Conclusion
We showed you the code to scrape data from a popular job portal, and it sure is not easy. We did not handle cases where the code might break, or where it might be blocked by the website. When you are scraping 10-15 different job portals. You need to handle edge-case scenarios for all of them and also maintain your code and make updates. It is based on updates to the UI of all the websites. Quick updates are a must to reduce data-downtime. If you look at all the factors at hand. This is not an easy task, and unless you have a full-blown web scraping team at your disposal. You should leave such a task to a team of professionals like ours at JobsPikr.
