Job scraping tools are as vital to the functioning of your job boards as our brain and senses are to our functioning as humans. That’s because job scraping tools are responsible for looking for, acquiring, and processing the resource that serves as the lifeblood for the functioning of the job board — job postings data. And the growing job market, combined with the emergence and expansion of the freelance or “gig” market means that there is a constant growth in the number of job postings put out by employers across the nation.
The ever-growing body of job postings data driven by the growing need for employers to find the right talent and the ever-present need of job-seekers to find the right jobs mean that the existing job market is rife with opportunities for job board companies. And to capitalize on this opportunity, job boards need to be prepared with the right set of tools that will enable them to gather as many job postings as possible. That means having a highly capable job posting scraping tool under the job board’s hood that can gather all the job postings available online.
Ensuring comprehensive job postings scraping
Job scraping tools, driven by algorithms, crawl the web and look for jobs in specific locations including the career sites of companies and other job sites and help fill job boards with jobs, their relevant information, and the link to the original site. If you’re like most job board companies, you probably use one of the numerous job scraping tools that promise to gather all the jobs from all across the web. These tools promise to be able to look crawl all across the internet to harvest job data to make your job board a tantalizing cornucopia of job postings for job-seekers. However, just like there are ineffective job boards, there are also job scraping tools that may not be as effective at gathering job postings as is necessary to build a competitive job board.
Creating a varied job database
To build a competitive job board, it needs to have a healthy volume as well as a variety of job postings. Hence, the job scraping tools employed by such sites need to be able to source job postings from a wide range of different sources. It needs to gather jobs from different industries and the top employers in each of those industries. They should also be able to gather job information from the career sites of smaller, lesser-known companies that may not necessarily follow the same format of job postings. This is because big corporations usually use high-end recruitment tools to create job postings, as opposed to the up-and-coming employers who probably rely on manual data entry to design job postings.
In addition to being able to gather job postings from large corporations, small start-ups and every organization in between, job boards and their job scraping tools also need to harvest job data from across different cities, regions, states, and — due to the increasing globalization of the job market — even different countries. This means looking through more than just a select few sources of job data. And often, different regions may have different terminology used to describe jobs, and different ways of representing data. For instance, the currency and the payroll cycle might be different for different jobs based on the regions they are posted in, requiring job boards to make sense of the data and present in as consistent a format as possible.
Job boards also need to include the different kinds of employment opportunities such as full-time as well as part-time positions, internships and co-op opportunities, contractual and permanent jobs, project-based employment and freelance positions. They should also have a healthy balance of entry, middle, and senior level employment options for students.
It is a given that job boards must gather jobs that are easily available jobs as they will make the bulk of the job postings they have. But, to truly differentiate themselves they should gather jobs from additional sources. Their job scraping tools must be able to source job postings from more obscure places on the internet to have the edge over a majority of other job boards who stop at just displaying the most easily discoverable jobs.
Creating niche job boards
However, the rule of focusing on variety obviously doesn’t apply to niche and specialized job boards that are highly targeted towards a specific industry, location, or experience level. For instance, there may be job boards that only present jobs that are available for entry-level workers, or those that may only display opportunities from the Oil and Gas industry. While focusing on their niche is important for such sites, volume matters even more here within the chosen niche.
That’s because to truly establish themselves as the job search option, they must be able to collect and present a high volume of jobs belonging to that niche, by far surpassing the number of similar jobs on general job sites. Because, why would someone prefer a niche job site if the same number of jobs in their desired niche and more from others can be found on a general job board?
Understanding the need for job data organization
While the primary role of job scraping tools may be to gather a heavy volume of jobs from the internet, organizing the gathered jobs onto the job board is just as important a task. That’s because, as emphasized above, job scraping, or rather, effective job scraping entails extracting information from a wide variety of sources. These sources will have different ways of presenting job postings and may even use differing terminologies for job-related data. The best job scraping tools are able to read job data regardless of format and present them in the programmed format in order to maintain consistency across the job board. This consistency is crucial for job boards as it gives the visitors (job-seekers) an easily navigable interface and makes it easy for them to find the information that matters to them.
Thus, job data optimization is a desirable feature of job scraping tools as it completely automates the process of job data collection and organization. Job boards that use job optimization technology can ensure that not only the quantity part of the equation is satisfied, but also the quality aspect is maintained.
Identifying the right job scraping tools for your job board
Job scraping tools should ideally be smart enough to identify and extract jobs from different sources while accurately parsing the information as intended by the original job posters. This ensures there is no misinterpretation that would confuse potential candidates and ruin their job board experience. Ensuring a smooth, hassle-free job board experience is critical in ensuring that visitors return and the job board becomes the most popular, and essentially the first choice for job-seekers over competitors. And to truly stay ahead of competitors, job boards must adopt cutting-edge job wrapping tools that extensively scour the internet for jobs, organize and optimize job data for the desired output format, and automatically update job details in case of any changes in the original job data.
The job crawling service provided by Propellum comes with all these features and more so that job board owners can automate their operations and focus on scaling their business. This solution can outperform most job scraping tools without requiring much manual input or supervision, saving time and resources that can be invested in more important areas. So, if you want a job board that runs itself and gives you the competitive edge, give Propellum a try today!
