Job Scraping Service

More than 50% of American workers are in search of a new job, and more than 55% of job seekers look for jobs on the internet. This proves the fact that the online job market is massive, and those who manage to keep track of fresh job data can expect positive results in their job search, job post aggregators, recruiting agencies or service. Web crawling, scraping, and parsing data from thousands of online sources simplifies the process of gathering data from the web, analyzing, and managing it. Job post data scraping from the web is the process of gathering job posts from job boards or companies’ websites. There are a lot of platforms, job portals, and job boards that aggregate a great number of job posts: Indeed, Glassdoor, Craigslist, LinkedIn, SimplyHired, Jobster, Dice, Facebook Careers, and more. And it is possible to scrape each of them, almost in real-time! A job scraping service is very helpful for recruiting companies, recruiters, or businesses that are engaged in this industry.

Job post data can be helpful in various ways and used for the following purposes.

• Current job and market trends analysis.
• Refreshing job data on job aggregator websites.
• Keeping job databases up-to-date at staffing agencies.
• Monitoring competitor’s open positions and compensation.
• Finding leads by offering your service to hiring companies.

If you want to do research on the job market, you can get a variety of data regarding a particular industry or region. We can set the job data feed and collect data over a period of time of your choosing. After that, data can be visualized so that you can get a clear picture of salary trends, the demand for particular professionals, and a ton of other helpful information. There is one nuance — jobs should be scraped once they occur at the original source. Otherwise, your data gets outdated very quickly. Each job post can be categorized (by title, description, salary, skills, working experience, etc.) for convenience. So you have the ability to aggregate, categorize, and select those that match your purpose with the help of data scraping and parsing technologies.

As mentioned above, there are two main sources for extracting job data – job aggregators and companies’ official sites. The first category contains an enormous amount of data, but they are harder to scrape due to anti-scraping techniques used for their protection, such as IP blockers, Captcha solving, honeypot traps, and many others. Another huge opportunity is monitoring companies’ websites. Many companies have a career section on their website. Depending on your goals, you can extract data from these sites, and analyze and monitor jobs from one company’s webpage, or from hundreds. Companies’ sites are easier to scrape, but different web sources use different interfaces, which is why different crawlers are required for the same purpose. In addition, the tools often require modifications after changes on the sites. All this complicates the task of job data scraping, making it rather time-consuming. However, web data scraping solutions and services may be quite useful and cost-efficient for the purpose.

DataOx serves a lot of clients related to job post scraping. One good example is the startup Firm Prospects, a platform that helps US legal recruiters find top candidates.

We monitor more than eight hundred legal companies’ websites and scrape them once an hour. Then we collect, parse, and structure job posts and send them to our client for manual correction if needed. The most challenging part is parsing job posts. People can phrase their experience, job description, and even title in free-form, so we developed a smart parser that recognizes all text patterns and can structure raw job posts into a spreadsheet. It’s vital to keep the quality of information at a proper level and to check it against strict quality guidelines so that faulty positions do not influence the overall data integrity. The problems can be really serious if the collected data is used for ML (Machine Learning) or AI (Artificial Intellect) processing, so we closely monitor the quality of the data points we provide. This is an example of a managed data service we offer: we get the request from the client, do all the work for them, and deliver the necessary information within the format and frequency required. An alternative to job scraping services is custom software development. We create job scraping solutions for our clients on request, taking the needs of their businesses into consideration. If you are interested in job post scraping and parsing services, schedule a free consultation with our expert to talk about your project and get a quote!