Gathering information on your industry’s labor market and competition is crucial for attracting top talent. You can uncover the demand for specific jobs and skills and learn how your competitors hire and retain employees. That helps you supercharge your talent acquisition, recruitment, and hiring strategies.
How can you gather relevant information? Scraping job posting data is one method. Let’s explore its benefits, challenges, and solutions.
Top benefits of collecting job posting data
Job posting data provides many benefits, but the following are the most prominent.
Data-driven talent acquisition and recruitment
Embracing web scraping to collect data on job postings lets you build a rich database of invaluable information. You can analyze it to gain insights into the labor market demand and trends, including the most sought-after skills in your industry or niche. You can also uncover skill shortages and emerging job markets.
Historical data can help you forecast demand and trends to empower data-driven decisions. Predictive analysis will take your talent acquisition and recruitment strategies to the next level.
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Fuelling competitive analysis
Job postings are excellent for evaluating the competition. After all, companies publish them online to fill vacancies or expand. They include data points like job title, description, employment type, location, industry, salary, and seniority, providing insight into their recruitment strategies and activities.
This information can help you compare salaries to offer better monetary value to job applicants. You can improve descriptions in your job postings to attract qualified candidates. You can also identify rapidly expanding companies and those scrambling to hire new employees and retain top talent.
Gathering investment intelligence
Job postings can help you discover what tech stacks your competitors use. Arming your database with technographic data, you can understand your competition’s strengths and weaknesses regarding adopted software solutions and planned implementations.
That way, you can improve your investment intelligence besides understanding your competitors’ talent acquisition strategies and hiring tactics.
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Challenges of scraping job posting data
Scraping online job postings to gather relevant data isn’t without challenges. Here are the most notable.
Extracting information from multiple data sources
Scraping data from a few websites is a breeze. Adding dozens of sources to the process is another story.
Besides various companies’ career website pages, you can extract data from job aggregators and online job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Wellfound, FlexJobs, Monster, CareerBuilder, and Ladders. Over 50,000 of them exist, making scraping time-consuming and expensive.
The most significant challenge lies in scraping dynamic websites. For instance, many websites change their structure and content according to visitors’ locations. That can negatively affect your data extraction efforts, providing inaccurate or irrelevant records.
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Encountering anti-scraping mechanisms
Many websites employ anti-scraping mechanisms like IP blocking, CAPTCHA tests, login requirements, honeypot traps, page redirects, custom HTTP status codes, and empty or fake results. They prevent you from sending multiple HTTP requests to their servers, which your web scraper does when extracting data.
Most of the time, you can bypass those restrictions with proxies (e.g., IP rotation), but the process is still time-consuming and expensive.
High web scraping implementation and maintenance costs
Here’s the most considerable challenge of scraping job posting data. Whether you develop an in-house web scraper or utilize an existing solution, your ongoing implementation and maintenance costs might go through the roof.
Besides the upfront development and deployment costs, you’ll need to maintain your web crawler and scraper and consider data processing expenses. If you don’t have an in-house tool, you’ll need to pay for an existing one and frequently customize it to account for dynamic websites. Either way, you’ll dig a money pit.
Best solutions for enriching your job posting database
You don’t need to worry about multiple data sources, anti-scraping techniques, high web scraping costs, and data processing expenses. You can overcome those obstacles with the following solutions.
Purchasing data from a reliable data provider
Data providers like Coresignal collect alternative data, including job postings, from multiple public sources. They regularly update their databases to provide accurate, relevant, up-to-date, complete records, helping clients make data-driven decisions.
Providers offering data as a service (DaaS) help companies achieve their goals through frequent, flexible, transparent, and scalable data delivery. They eliminate the need to scrape multiple platforms for job ads because they do the legwork for you, providing a rich job portals dataset.
The best part? You don’t need to convert unstructured into structured data to prepare it for cleansing and analysis – you get parsed, ready-to-use data. You can choose the desired delivery method (e.g., a direct download, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, etc.), frequency, and format (e.g., CSV or JSON) to make data analysis a breeze.
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Utilizing a job scraping API
Job scraping APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are fantastic for gathering on-demand job posting data. They’re dedicated web scrapers that let you feed specific URLs into their seed sets for data extraction, notifying you once they finish the job and providing up-to-date records in your desired format.
The option above gives you access to an existing database, while a job scraping API lets you choose publicly available sources to scrape. It’s also perfect for refreshing your database.
Coresignal offers a user-friendly, easy-to-integrate job scraping API ideal for small-scale projects and specific URL requirements. It provides structured data in HTML or JSON format, supercharging your data-driven recruitment, investment intelligence, and market research efforts.
Conclusion
Job posting data can provide invaluable insights into your target market, helping you attract and retain top talent and outpace competitors. However, collecting it can be challenging, time-consuming, and expensive, primarily if you rely on self-service web scrapers.
Embracing data as a service and leveraging a dedicated job scraping API can help you overcome all obstacles and gather relevant information for data-driven decisions. Regardless of your industry or niche, you can save precious time and resources while achieving business goals.