Job Scraping: Methods, Insights and Alternatives

In October 2023, the number of job openings in the US was over 8.7 million. A few months earlier, there were over a million more job openings. It shows how quickly the job market changes.

It's a dynamic market where employers and employees must be quick on their feet, staying informed about potential opportunities and acting accordingly.

But it can be difficult to keep track of all the data, especially because it changes over time. That's why job scraping has become a prevalent method for acquiring job data.

Today, we'll talk about scraping job postings, how this process works, the benefits, and how you can utilize it to your advantage.

What is job posting data?

Job posting data is the information you can find in job listings or advertisements employers publish to attract potential employees for their open positions. Depending on the platform where the job postings were published, it can include different data. Here's the job data you can expect to find:

Job titles & descriptions

Job postings data includes job titles and descriptions. These data points give a clear overview of the role that help understand what the job entails. The job description will also outline the duties, tasks, and responsibilities that come with the title.

Job qualifications and requirements

All job postings must outline the qualifications, experience, education, and skills required from the applications to be considered for the position. Potential applicants need to know whether or not they fit the criteria.

It helps job seekers apply for the right job postings, and companies get many quality applicants. For companies who analyze job posting data, it provides insights into what qualifications are popular, what tech stacks businesses use, and more.

Relevant company information

Company information is an essential aspect of job data. Some common company information in job posting data includes business location, industry, name, and some basic background. 

Job salary and benefits

Job postings include the benefits employees can expect after working and the expected salary if accepted. That information builds trust and transparency while helping candidates understand if that role can fulfill their expectations.

Companies can analyze this data to get insights into competitive salaries in specific industries, popular/new benefits, and more. These insights can be helpful for crafting more competitive job offers or for simply analyzing the job market.

The benefits of job scraping

The main benefits of scraping job postings are:

Aggregating job listings

Web scraping job postings allows you to aggregate job listings from several platforms into a centralized location. It gives you a complete overview of available listings on multiple job boards.

Saves time

Extracting job postings can be an automated process, meaning that companies can quickly go through data from multiple job boards and save time.

Better job matching

Scraping job boards can be used to create sophisticated tools and algorithms for purposes like job matching, which enables job seekers to find positions they prefer or those that align with their skills.

Quick updates

Automated job board scraping means organizations can quickly gather data from multiple sources and get the latest information with regular updates.

Analyzing competition

Companies scrape job postings to analyze and monitor the job market with an overview of the required skills, salary trends, and job listings. It helps make informed decisions when it comes to acquiring the right talent.

Improved recruiting efforts

Job scraping allows for building tools that help optimize recruitment processes, helping recruiters fill positions with the right people more quickly.

Why is it hard to scrape job postings?

Even though job scraping has many benefits, there are also multiple challenges.

Getting accurate and quality data

Quality and accuracy are essential in web scraping. It's crucial to scrape job postings that are relevant and offer value. Websites often change structures, which could lead to errors during extraction. Multiple job board websites can have different listings that make it challenging to gather structured and quality data consistently.

Data duplicates

Scraping job data leads to duplicate entries, especially if the same job postings are present on multiple websites. Setting up systems and managing this duplicate data can be difficult for job scraping.

Dynamic job boards

Websites have various dynamic structures that load content using JavaScript. Typical scraping methods can have difficulties gathering dynamic job postings, which could lead to incomplete data.

Web scraping blocks

Only publicly available web data can be scraped. Still, many websites restrict the number of requests, block IP addresses if you're over the limit, and use anti-scraping mechanisms like Captcha and geo-blocking. Only a professional job scraper can go around these mechanisms.

Ethical and legal implications

Job scraping data professionals understand all of the terms of services of the websites they scrape. They understand the laws and regulations regarding scraping, and how to navigate through these regulations to ensure they're not harming anyone in the process.

Main job scraping methods

Scraping is a process that can be done in different ways. It all depends on the job board, application, specific needs, and the type of scraper used. Here are some of the most used job scraping methods:

Manual job extraction

This is the simplest method for extracting job listings and tracking job trends. However, it's not scraping, it's a manual process where users go from one site to another to extract data. It's very time-consuming and leads to inconsistencies.

Web scraping and scripts

Developers create web scrapers and custom scripts for web scraping efforts. That includes extracting data, parsing it, and storing it in a desired format.

Job aggregator sites

Job aggregator sites use different web scraping methods to collect information from multiple job listing sites to give a wider picture of the actual market.

Scraping providers and APIs

Various third-party APIs and web scraping providers offer job extraction. They handle all aspects of scraping data and deliver the data in a structured format to their customers.

RSS feeds for collecting data

Some platforms give their users the option to subscribe to RSS feeds. These direct updates on the latest listings allow users to aggregate feeds from multiple platforms.

Conclusion

Web scraping job listings isn't easy, especially if you need large volumes of accurate, consistent, and quality data. That's why many organizations outsource these services to professionals who understand the ins and outs of web scraping applications.