Linkedin is one of the largest professional social networking sites in the world and holds a wealth of information about industry insights, data on professionals, and job data. One of the most commonly used tools to extract large amounts of Linkedin public data is Web Scraping.
Why Scrape Linkedin public data?
There are many reasons why a company may require to extract data from Linkedin. You may be associated with a project that requires checking your Linkedin company profile or your competitors. Or you may want to automate the recruitment process and search for great candidates by scraping profiles on a large scale. Automating this process with Web scraping can save your company quality time and money.
Another application where job seekers leverage Linkedin company scraping is when they want to automate their job search. They fill in specific criteria based on the company they want to work for. This is where a scraper can accumulate this information into a structured format and provide you the results you seek.
In this tutorial, we will show you the basic steps on how to scrape the publicly available LinkedIn data using Python.
Prerequisites:
In this tutorial, we will use basic Python as well as some python packages – LXML and requests.
But first, you need to install the following things:
1. Python accessible here ( https://www.python.org/downloads/)
2. Python Requests accessible here (http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/install/). You could need Python pips to install this accessible here –
3. Python LXML (Study how to install it here – http://lxml.de/installation.html)
Once you’re done with installing, here’s the python code to extract LinkedIn public data from company pages. Tie it with an IP rotator and you can do this at scale.
One of the challenges that you may encounter is the use of authwalls, which are pages that require login or signups for viewing public content. Moreover, Linkedin also uses advanced bot detection technology. It is recommended to use Request Headers, Proxies, and IP Rotation to prevent getting Captchas
To learn more on how to overcome anti-scraping tools on websites, visit our guide: How to Bypass Anti-Scraping Tools on Websites
Datahut has a pre-built crawler that lets you scrape large-scale LinkedIn data without any coding required. Reach out to Datahut