The trickiest question that can be asked when you sit for any job interview: "What pay/salary do you expect?". This question holds all the chances to get you in and get you out too. You don't want to ask for more than they are willing to pay, and you also don't want to ask for less than the other companies are ready to offer.
So what is the solution for this? Proper industry research! And concisely saying Job scraping!
According to a survey on the job search methods of U.S. adults by the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans (54%) have used the Internet to gather information about jobs, and approximately as many (45%) have used the Online services to apply for jobs. This is more than double the number reported by Pew in 2005 when 26% of Americans said they had used the Online opportunity to research for work.
Scraping job postings has become essential because who doesn't want to extract data relevant to jobs? Everyone is searching for better opportunities, from companies looking to recruit to people looking to find roles in demand, typical pay, expectations of the company, and more. The opportunities from job scraping are endless.
Read on to know more about job scraping and how it will benefit you.
What is Job scraping?
There are numerous sites and social media networks that post job listings and offer employment opportunities, out of which Indeed, Facebook and LinkedIn are the top-ranked jobs posting sites. According to a recent report, currently, there are 16 million online job postings. From there, finding an appropriate job matching your expectations can be as challenging as finding a source of water in the middle of a desert.
Web scraping will help you with this! It will collect job listings from all the relevant types of industry or topic-particular data sources and present you in an organized form that best suits your needs in one location. This is what we call Job scraping.
There are numerous ways to make use of job data such as:
Providing new job data to employment aggregator sites.
Data is collected in order to analyze job trends and the labor market.
To get a major competitive advantage, keep track of vacant positions, compensations, and benefits plans.
Obtaining leads by marketing your service to organizations that are looking to hire for similar positions.
To maintain their job listings up to date, staffing firms trawl job boards.
How can Job scraping benefit businesses?
Job searchers and the organizations who extract data will leverage the various benefits because their understanding of the job market will improve. Following are the benefits of Web Scraping that will benefit businesses:
1. Find the desired salary:
Salary is the primary motivation for any employee to work harder. Therefore, it is a crucial factor for both parties. Employees don't want to ask for more than employers are willing to pay and don't want to ask for less than the industry is ready to offer. Similarly, employers want to keep their costs less and make sure they do not let go of talented staff because of the salary measure. Here, web scraping will help you get a more profound knowledge of what other companies in the industry are ready to offer. Accordingly, you can decide your appropriate range of salary.
2. Relevant Data:
Acquiring relevant and up-to-date information and datasets related to industry trends is the most crucial aspect of every business. Salaries, work requirements, and corporate policies change over time, so staying updated is critical. This is true for any organization engaging in job advertisements, whether an online job board or an HR firm.
3. Stay competitive:
The key to success is reliability. The main goal of every online job board is to have enough job postings to attract new visitors and retain the old ones. In addition, being organized and consistent with the data provided by HR agencies ensures that employers will return for more relevant company profiles or job advertisements because they trust you. And for all these, scraping job postings is the solution!
Industries that can benefit from job scraping:
Many industries use job scraping, and here are the top user:
1. HR Agencies:
In the HR market, job data scraping has a lot of potential. HR agencies and service companies are meant to have up-to-date job listings and accurate industry information in order to attract new clients and retain the old ones. Additionally, as an HR agency, you will be helping hundreds of firms in their recruitment process, so you have to stay updated about the job profiles, salary ranges, and many more aspects of the industry. HR firms can use job data scraping to obtain job posts that are both geography and sector-specific and will provide you with relevant new job data.
2. Online Job Boards:
An online job board company is a marketplace where employers find the right talent, and the employees get the right job opportunity according to their distinct needs. As their work process implies, online job boards have to be necessarily updated about the industry insights to help users with the best experience. The service providers collect information on employee profiles, industry reports, and job descriptions regarding job postings. Job web scraping services will provide you with the most up-to-date data to analyze and post on your website, making your content more pertinent, valuable, and updated for both job seekers and employers.
3. Companies/ Startups looking to expand:
If you are a startup or thinking of an expansion, you need talented staff for different posts. But, online job boards may not seem sufficient and reliable in such cases because you have your distinct requirements regarding each post. In this case, scraping job postings will not only help you know the availability of talented employees but will also help you decide various factors of that post such as salary range, job description, work hours according to the competitive companies in the industry. Hence, keeping you on a winning edge.
Challenges in Scraping Job Postings
Beginning with the primary step in scraping job postings, you can either scrap job listings from companies' career sections on their official websites or the job listing sites. Now, each option has its own pros and cons, but the major ones that every scraper will face are anti-scraping techniques used by Job listing sites to prevent data extraction. Significant challenges among these can be blocking IP addresses, Anonymisation Deficit, Legal risks, CAPTCHA Based Blocking, and many more. If you want to know more about these challenges, you can check 10 Web Scraping Challenges You Need to Know.
Furthermore, this issue is somehow not a problem when scraping official companies' sites, but you can face the problem of developing a unique web scraping interface to scrape different sites. This will not only lead to wastage of time and money but will also reduce efficiency.
What are the options for scraping job data?
1. Hiring a web scraping service:
You can outsource a web scraping service from professional experts. This is undoubtedly the best way that one can think of while searching for options for scraping job data. With the least cost, guaranteed efficiency, reliable structure, and up-to-date information, web scraping professionals can help you achieve your objectives quickly. Amazing advantages of these services are that data is sent straight to you i.e. no training cost is required and the service is especially suited to your requirements. Whereas, the cost can be outrageously high depending on the service and data required.
2. In-house web scraping setup:
Another option is to hire a web scraping expert. Web scraping in-house service, through your own IT staff and tools, has its own upsides and downsides. This can also be a good option because of the fewer communication challenges and properly customized scraping process according to your own requirements. But, hiring can be time-consuming and a costly process that not every company can afford and would like to.
3. Using a web scraping tool:
You can also use job scraping tools that scrape data on your specific demands and convert the requested HTML and web data in an organized form according to your needs. Although it can be a good option for small-scale scraping, these Job scraping tools do not work efficiently in the case of large-scale scraping and can lead to waste time and money. Whereas, a budget-friendly approach and user-friendly are the major pros of a web scraping tool.
Why Outsource Job Scraping to A Web Scraping Service?
To get the best out of the opportunity and to efficiently and effectively extract data for various job listings, you'll need knowledgeable and professional people that can organize all of the data logically. The following are the reasons that a web scraping service like Datahut can automate the above process easily:
Imagine going through each job posting manually through thousands of websites via a job search engine. Seems exhausting? Yes, it is! Web Scraping service will provide you all the industry-relevant job postings in the most structured and efficient manner. No wastage of money and time!
Similarly, recruiting an in-house web scraper can be too costly for the company.
A web Scraping service gets job listings from true, up-to-date, and accurate databases.
A web Scraping service will help you find positions with value-added data from the required corporate career websites and job boards, such as skills, seniority, category, and more.
A web Scraping service will provide you web scraping service from any website that allows crawlers lawfully.
The dynamics have changed more in the COVID times. Job listing and job scraping have become an integral part of today's working environment, with everything being conducted online. Numerous case studies demonstrate how organizations all across the world scrape job listings to fuel their operations.
Given the importance of web scraping, an adequately customized job scraping service is the one that can provide you with a competitive advantage by allowing you to exploit job-related data for your firm. The job scraping service from Datahut is precisely what you need. Contact datahut to learn more.
Related Reading: