The number of unemployed people in the UK has been growing continuously over the past few months. By the end of 2018, the number of unemployed in the UK exceeded a million from around 0.8 million at the beginning of that year. If these trends are anything to go by, then it is safe to assume that the number of unemployed will rise in the coming period as well. If you run a job portal or a job board in the UK, the increasing number of unemployed persons offers a growing opportunity for you.
That’s because, among other means of finding new jobs, job portals still remain a predominant medium despite the growth of professional networking sites. And to compete with these networking sites, not to mention hordes of other job portals, you need to ensure that your job portal offers an unparalleled job search experience and results. And how to go about it, you ask? The answer to that is quite simple: provide visiting job-seekers with a high volume of high-quality jobs, consistently. And to do that, you’ll need to look beyond just the outer interface and design of your job portal. You need to look, or re look, the job search site scrapers that gather the commodity that is most vital to your job portal — job data.
Recognizing the importance of job search site scrapers
The aesthetics of a website — regardless of whether it is a job search site or not — undoubtedly play a key role in determining the quality of user experience. This, in turn, impacts the likelihood of the user revisiting and consistently using that particular website. But, while design and looks remain an important aspect of job board portals, their functionality is what users really want. And, the primary function of job portals is to search, collect, and deliver all the jobs that a user searches. To achieve this, a job portal must be based on a web crawling tool or a job scraper. Job search site scrapers form the foundation, as it were, of job portals. They are responsible for gathering the jobs from different source sites, job feeds, and other places on the web where job data is available.
Job search site scrapers aggregate large volumes of job data from across the web, providing job portals with the large collection of jobs that they display to job-seekers. They not only find jobs, but extract job details and relevant information from the source, and post it onto the job portals with the relevant links to the source. This eliminates the need for human effort and data entry to find and post jobs to job boards. Good job search site scrapers essentially automate the operations of a job portal, minimizing the need for human intervention.
While the volume of job data collected and posted on a job portal is a key performance indicator for job search site scrapers, it is not the only one. Equal in importance is the quality of the jobs posted. That is because, most job scrapers, while being able to gather and process massive quantities of job data, do not focus on job data quality. They are not smart enough to differentiate inaccurate records, incomplete information, or duplicate and expired job postings. Thus, job portals that use such job scrapers end up with a large number of jobs, most of which are either expired, invalid, or repetitive. When a majority of the jobs on a job board lead to 404 errors, spammy links, or expired jobs, the credibility and reliability of the job portal drops. When this happens on a consistent basis, before long, the website stops being a trusted source of jobs and loses traffic. And with the internet teeming with hundreds of job portals, it doesn’t take long for job-seekers to switch from one site to another. In such a situation, not even stunning design and aesthetics can help a job portal from plunging into oblivion.
Thus, job search site scrapers are vital for the overall functioning of a job portal, and job portal owners must pay special attention to the scraping tools that they use.
Using job portal scrapers to boost traffic
Now we know how having a job scraping tool that doesn’t intelligently balances volume with the quality of job data can lead to job portal losing trust, and consequently, traffic. It stands to reason, then, that improving traffic entails using smarter scraping tools. So, what makes a ‘smart’ scraping tool better than other forms of job scraping technologies?
Quantity, while definitely not being the end all, be all indicator of the efficacy of job scraping tools, is still important. After all, job-seekers prefer job sites that offer them a large selection of job opportunities relevant to their search terms, so that they can compare and decide which ones to pursue. Thus, to compete with other job sites, it is necessary to have a larger selection of jobs than them. To do so, your job scraping tool needs to be powerful enough to do the hard work of exhaustively crawling through sources in as short a time as possible and post them to the concerned job sites. Smart job scraping tools are able to read and identify job data regardless of the format and the location they are posted in. This ensures that they have the biggest collection of job data, including jobs that other scraping tools may have missed.
Quality-wise, job search site scrapers are not only able to find and identify jobs from different sources on the web. They are also able to extract all the relevant information that needs to be replicated on the job portal for job-seekers to analyze and compare. Smart job scrapers can verify the job information and validate jobs based on criteria such as the date of posting, date of expiry, and the number of positions currently vacant. They can directly source jobs from the applicant tracking systems (ATS) of employers to get the most accurate information as soon as that information is posted by those employers. These job search site scrapers are also adept at identifying duplicate and repetitive job positions, thus preventing such jobs from being posted on the job portals.
Ensuring a balance between high volume and high reliability of job information allows these smart job scrapers to make their job portals highly valuable for job-seekers. Since the primary function of a job board, i.e., the aggregation of jobs, is essentially automated by scrapers, job portal owners can focus on improving the other aspects of their job boards. For instance, they can invest their time in improving the design and the overall user experience. Or, they can focus on scaling their operations and expanding their offerings.
Choosing the right job portal scrapers in UK to boost traffic
Now that the importance of having good job search site scrapers is established, it is important to know how to identify the best job scraping tools available. The best job scraping tools, in addition to having the aforementioned capability to balance the quality and quantity of job data, must also have other features such as:
- High customization
- Ability to integrate ATSs via API
- 24×7 customer support
- Regular updates as and when developed
- Low implementation and maintenance costs
Although there are numerous job scraping tools available for job portals, very few job search site scrapers come with all the above features and benefits. One such solution is the job scraping tool by Propellum, an experienced job board technology provider. In addition to providing the above benefits, Propellum’s job crawling solution comes with a whole lot of additional features. To know more about the tools full capability and features, request a demo, now!
