The Ultimate Guide to Web Scraping Job Postings
As unemployment rates continue to soar, job seekers are faced with the whole new challenge of identifying potential opportunities and taking advantage of them. Luckily, in the modern age of the internet, they can have all that in one place!
The Internet is the new home for job openings, and over the years, the online job market has experienced significant growth, even going on to overtake in-person hiring and job applications.
Job postings have become one of the most sought-after data points on the internet, and extracting them effectively requires web scraping. This means that to land your dream job, you have to be tech-savvy, but where to start when it comes to job scraping? Well, here’s a detailed run-down on where to start, what works best, and how to scrape job postings from the web.
What is Job Scraping
Job scraping is the process of gathering job information online programmatically. Simply put, it involves automatically collecting data on job openings from multiple job portals, saving the time and effort required.
Whether you’re in the job market for simple temporary tasks to complete or complex opportunities from writing services, you want to play smart and not hard, and web scraping is the best way to do it. That said, having a tool that can scrape entire databases of relevant job openings will pay dividends multiple times, even though some websites have serious restrictions that often leave you staring down at legal issues. But how can it be done safely and effectively? Let’s find out!
How to Scrape Job Postings
Use a Job Scraping Tool
As with most other online tasks, web scraping has become more and more automated over the years, meaning that you can collect data from the internet without knowing too much about web scraping. As long as you are specific about the type of job postings you are looking for, there are numerous software programs that you can use.
Web scraping tools traverse the internet and collect data according to the specific instructions they are given by the user. In this case, you have to ‘tell’ the scraping tool what you need through ‘drags’ and ‘clicks.’
After interpreting your needs, the tool then traverses the internet and collects all the relevant job postings by deciphering the HTML structure of the webpage that you directed it to. Apart from the fact that you can use the tool on a budget, it is also friendly to non-coders and gives you the keys to the scraping kingdom so you have more control over the process.
Build Your Own Infrastructure
Instead of employing the services of a job-scraping tool, you can always choose to develop and set up your own, and here are things you need to consider before doing so:
Analyze and select the best languages, frameworks, APIs, and libraries that will serve your purpose. The choice of each depends on the type of sites you plan to access the data from and how much data you need.
Have a simple version of the tool ready for testing purposes. You also need a reliable and stable environment, as you will need to test progress at every step of the development process.
For efficiency and time management, you will need to cache data so that you don’t have to go back to the website every time you need it. This requires you to invest in more efficient data storage units.
Scrape with Proxies
Proxies are perhaps the best solution to web scraping, and even more so for job scraping. They work by letting you gather information about job opportunities from multiple web pages while avoiding being blocked by the sites.
For job scraping, the best type of proxies to use are datacenter proxies due to their stability and high speeds. On the other hand, residential proxies can often be used to achieve the same result, though they are not as effective.
If you’re not sure which type of proxy to use for job scraping, you can use both residential and datacenter proxies to achieve the desired result. However, if you’re targeting specific potential employers within a known geolocation, residential proxies edge it as they offer a large proy IP pool with city- and even country-level targeting.
Job Scraping Challenges
Like any other web scraping process, gathering data on job openings and postings comes with a host of challenges you have to overcome, but only if you’re willing to go the extra mile. Here are some of the challenges.
There are numerous websites on which job openings can be advertised. This makes it harder to job-scrape, as you are often required to give the scraper specific sites where they should access the postings. Moreover, most job scraping tools charge according to the number of websites and web pages they have to access to collect the data you need, posing a major challenge.
Web development has advanced significantly over the years, leading to an increase in security measures on websites to prevent web scraping. Some of these security features include IP identification and blocking, CAPTCHAs, using user agents, and sign-in requirements.
Web scrapers, especially self-developed ones, may be tailored to scrape data from specific websites. However, some website designs may prove too hard for the scraping tool to access and retrieve the requested information.
Some websites load slowly due to their complicated structures or web server delays, which may slow down the entire data collection process.
However, with the necessary tools and skills, such as using proxies to avoid IP detection, we can always work around some of these challenges, leading to smooth job scraping.
