Data scraping, data crawling, data harvesting or data extraction all refer to the process of collecting all kinds of industry or topic-specific data on the web for many sectors including e-commerce, market research, human resources, and real estate. Web scraping is not something new, it has been over for many years.
However, the amount of data on the web is increasing at an enormous speed, and many businesses can’t use data harvesting beneficially, as finding the reliable and valuable data can be very time consuming for the company. According to Cisco, global internet traffic stroke 1.1 zettabytes (one zettabyte is equal to 36,000 years of HD videos) at the end of 2016, and the number is estimated to be over 2.3 zettabytes by 2020. A research group IDC predicted that the world will be creating 163 zettabytes (one trillion gigabytes) of data a year by 2025.
The amount of data is simply outrageous. That’s why there are currently many web scraping services that can offer you an efficient scraping service. Job scraping is one of the services such companies offer. This service can be very efficient and valuable for many different companies, and this post will tell you why, how and for what job scraping can be used.
What is Job Scraping
First and foremost, let’s understand what job scraping means. Currently, there are numerous job postings available all over the web, so finding a relevant job that is up-to-date and authentic can be quite time-consuming. With the help of data crawling, the huge amount of job postings will be collected and sorted from all over the web in one place and in the format that fits your specific needs. This process is called job scraping. Job scraping can offer many benefits to you and your business, which we’ll discuss later in this post.
Who Can Use Job Scraping Services
With the help of web harvesting and data extraction, job scraping can be used by many different companies and industries. Here are the top companies that can benefit from job scraping.
Online Job Boards
Job boards are online job platforms that offer two main services – one to job seekers and the other to employers. Job seekers can put out their CVs on the job board websites and look for available job offers online. Employers can upload a job vacancy to make it visible on the website, as well as review the resumes of the possible candidates. Besides job postings, job boards also collect information about company profiles, employee profiles, and job descriptions. All four constitute a job board website.
The amount of job board websites is huge, but not all of them can provide you or your business with an appropriate information. Given the enormous amount of job postings online, it is almost impossible to find a relevant and valid information, as it is not reviewed and updated as regularly as it should be done. Hence, the information available is divided into active and passive candidates. That’s the main reason why many online job boards are failing today.
Job scraping and data crawling can be very useful for online job boards. In fact, it is even essential that such companies use job scraping services to succeed and survive in the industry. Data scraping should be used for both general online job boards and especially for niche online job boards, which target more narrow and job-specific offers and vacancies. Job scraping service can provide you with the freshest data for you to analyze and post on your website, making your content always relevant, up-to-date and useful for both employers and job seekers.
Specific Industry Companies
Industry-specific companies are another potential job scraping users. This is especially true for either new businesses or businesses that are looking for fast enlargement, as they both need to find good hires in no time. As job boards won’t always provide you with the best options for your specific needs, your company will have to do a broad research on its own and spend a lot of its priceless time on this.
Data extraction plays an important role in your company’s recruitment process. Of course, it is important to choose a good candidate for your company, but it is impossible to do if you are unable to find a list of potential active candidates that are worth to hire from. To make the process less time-consuming for your business, web scraping services will do the job for you. It will provide you with fresh data from all over the web, so you can analyze it and spend your time on more important aspects of the business.
HR Agencies
Job scraping has a big potential in the HR industry. The way you can use it for your HR company is similar to any other business that uses job scraping: to find the best job data on the web. However, since HR companies deal specifically with human resource management and recruitment, it is even more important for them to always have valid and timely data.
HR companies can use job scraping to collect job postings that are both industry-specific and location-specific. Different companies will refer to your HR agency for their employee recruitment. Your main job must be concentrated on conducting interviews, staffing, and personnel placement. Job scraping will provide you with the appropriate fresh job data so that you can focus on the main task, without spending your time on the web looking for available jobs.
The Benefits of Job Scraping
In this hypercompetitive world, your company always needs data to stay onboard. The benefits job scraping will offer to your business are as follows:
Keeps the finger on the pulse
With job scraping, you will always be up-to-date and have relevant information. The competitive technology era we live in won’t let your company survive if you’re not progressive enough. This is true for any business that is involved in job postings, be it an HR agency or an online job board company. Having the latest job posts is essential for your success and efficiency.
Guaranteed success
You can’t go wrong with job scraping. If the data is already available out there, then you’ll definitely be able to make use of it. With an efficient data crawling technique, job scraping is guaranteed to be successful.
Consistent and organized
Consistency is the key to success, especially for data crawling. Conducting regular job scraping will keep your data organized and consistent. For a web job board, the main target is to always provide enough job posts. Not enough job posts means no job seekers on your website, hence ineffective service delivery. And for HR companies, being consistent and organized with the provided data ensures that companies will always be back to ask for more relevant job postings or company profiles. Consistency and organization will keep your company competitive in the industry.
Why Outsource Job Scraping to a Web Scraping Service
There are many reasons why you should consider to outsource data harvesting to a web scraping company. Although other web harvesting techniques exist too, they won’t be as effective as web scraping service. Consider the following techniques and why they are ineffective:
Job search engines
When searching for a job on a job search engine, you will end-up with thousand of job offers and candidates from all over the internet. The number of findings on such search engines is so big that their provided data becomes simply useless, as analyzing such a data is impossible.
Conducting research on your own
Surfing over the web in a hope of creating a good job data spreadsheet will result in a similar scenario as looking for a job on a search engine. It will be extremely time consuming and inefficient. It’s impossible to make use of such huge data on your own. While hiring a team that will do that for your business in-house is costly.
Hire researchers
You can also consider hiring special researchers that will research for jobs all over the web. But considering that hiring additional employees will result in higher costs, it is more cost-efficient to order the service from a web scraping company for lower cost.
The Perks of a Web Scraping Service
Time efficient: the most obvious web scraping service benefit is that it will ensure that your company is concentrated on more important aspects of the business operations. Outsourcing job scraping will help you use the time wisely.
Fast and consistent: a web scraping service company will do job scraping faster than anyone else. You name the deadline, and they will give you the ready spreadsheet by the due date. For a job board website, fresh data should be scraped on a regular basis.
No technical issues: doing job scraping in-house demands a high level of technical skills which makes the procedure difficult to implement. Web scraping service will make sure to deal with all the obstacles that come up during the web harvesting process from numerous websites.
No maintenance: web scraping service requires no maintenance unlike the tools or software; so working with a web scraping company is very easy.
Cost efficient: data crawling can get expensive for your business, as the more you dig into the data, the more work you need to do. When you outsource the work to a web scraping service from the beginning, the company will do all the work for a fixed price. Hence you’ll have the opportunity to control your finances without any unexpected alterations, even if your work with a web scraping service is on a long-term basis.cra
Niche data: the overwhelming amount of data available makes it pretty hard for an individual to find very narrow job-specific information. With a web crawling service, a whole team will be working on extracting data for specifically your wants and needs, scraping the most detailed job data for a particular location or industry.
