Web crawling shares a long history of evolution and application with various business segments. A lot of businesses, in fact, have their foundation ingrained in crawling, which involves the systematic browsing of a vast database to look for information that’s relevant to the purpose of the search. The most well-known and popular example of crawling is the web crawlers that visit the umpteen web pages and acquire data, which in turn is used by web search engines to update their content. But not all crawlers are meant for the web. Since a crawler, in essence, is nothing but a program that automates the search and indexing of data, they can be put to a lot of different and unique applications; job crawling being one of them.
So, what do job crawlers do?
Job crawlers unleash the potential of the age-old crawling techniques in the recruitment parlance to translate the power of this technology in finding the most niche, latest, and relevant job feeds for job portals. If you’re a job board and would like to become the most sought after portal for employer and career sites to post their job openings and for candidates to hunt jobs, you need to support:
- Accurate job postings
- Multilingual job wrapping
- Global coverage of job postings
- 24×7 import of all kinds of job feeds
But to have any or all of these, you first need to have a job crawler in place.
“So, does that mean that without job crawling there is no way I can run a job board?” The answer is Yes and No. If you wish to have a job board that showcases a limited and mostly outdated set of job postings that just about any other job board could have, you can do without an efficient job crawler. But if you envision your job board to become a cornerstone in the field of talent acquisition and recruitment, you can’t proceed without setting this significant process in place. Job crawling leaves no stone unturned by passionately searching for the most exclusive, latest, and premium job feeds from around the world. So if a vacancy exists online, your job crawler will scour all possible online sources to have the job posted on your job portal. And we strongly feel that all job boards must demand that out of their job crawler? because no career or employer site will ever say, “Let’s post our jobs on that job portal that hosts the most outdated and generic job postings so that no candidate should ever care respond to our openings.”
Remember, quality job postings beget more quality job postings!
It’s quite natural for career and employer sites to gravitate towards job boards that already host exclusive and high-quality postings rather than to those that are overwhelmed with massive job aggregation.
State-of-the-art, premium job crawlers like Propellum will get your job board connected with the most coveted and top ranked employers and recruiters. Such a crawler will in fact, go an extra mile to offer:
- Compatibility with any and every job source that can be hosted online, such as online blogs, online doc files, FTP hosted files, etc.
- Seamless integration with a job board’s existing IT infrastructure
- Navigation through varying job formats, spacing, and structures created by different employer and career sites
- Access to the most lucrative and revenue-generating clients
The Cake Analogy
However, no stand-alone job crawler can offer your job portal so much, and if a crawler makes that claim then you’ve got to prepare yourself for incurring additional and probably an escalating cost of implementation. We can say this with a lot of confidence because we’ve spent almost two decades empowering job boards to know that a stand-alone job crawling tool or technology will not be able to consistently and coherently fit into the end-to-end requirements of a job board. Let’s understand this point with the help of a simple analogy. Imagine you decide to bake a cake for a family dinner. After having mixed half the ingredients, you get an important phone call that you just have to take. So, you ask your spouse to take over, without sharing any details on what’s already been added to the batter. Now, the fate of the cake is pretty indecisive, to say the least. You don’t want to do something so risky with your job portal, right? The idea, therefore, is not just to have a job crawler on board, but also to have the most effective one.
The (right) job crawlers:
- Are customizable and fit all your job aggregation needs
- Are scalable and allow you to grow your client-base with worry-free data quality
- Increase job liquidity
- Offer unlimited job source selection
- Completely automate the process of job sourcing
- Avoid sending traffic to other job aggregators
- Avoid spam by fetching jobs from original sources
Wondering how job boards can start using job crawling?
Now that enough has been discussed about the wonders of leveraging a job crawler in your job portal business, the next question is – how? How do I use the job crawling technology in my business? So, there are three things you could do:
- develop an in-house team of experts who can who can make use of some open-source technologies and build upon them to crawl through career sites and hunt for job feeds,
- buy some ‘DIY’ tool and ask a dedicated team to use it for quicker access to job feeds, while facing lesser technical barriers than with the approach above,
- outsource all your job crawling needs to an external provider.
But before you make a choice, understand the implications of your choice well. The first approach will demand a dedicated team that can take care of the end-to-end monitoring of the crawl pipeline. Scalability can be a big issue here, as the number of career sites you target keep growing. The in-house team will have to spend innumerable hours and resources to obtain the latest job feeds, leaving them with little to no time to focus on the job board’s core function that crawls were only meant to supplement.
The second approach, on the other hand, saves time and resources but suffers from its own set of challenges, scalability, and customization being the biggest. Besides, in case of any technical glitch or failure, such off-the-shelf crawling tools offer very limited control on the fixes.
Allow Propellum to introduce you to the ‘real’ power of job crawling
Outsourcing your job crawling needs to an external provider brings you clean, structured, and continuous job feeds; no matter how many career sites you wish to target and how varying and complex their page structures are. Since Propellum is a leader in the space of job crawling and aggregation, it utilizes rock-solid technology that’s backed by super efficient customer service and a team of domain experts. Besides, it truly helps that we offer a holistic recruitment solution, targeted especially for job boards, that covers:
- Job crawling
- Job aggregation
- Job wrapping
- Job posting automation
- Job feed categorization
And while our offerings are multiple, the process we follow remains simple and streamlined for our client’s understanding:
We find out client requirements -> Seamlessly integrate the requirements in our software to crawl and find the most relevant job feeds -> Make the job postings go live on your job board platform.
Propellum’s SaaS based recruitment solutions have been built to incorporate all client requirements while enabling accelerated and accurate onboarding of jobs directly from employer and career sites to job boards and professional networking sites. So if you wish to experience the power of recruitment technology that offers your job board advantages like the ones listed below, choose Propellum:
- Quick turnaround time
- High scalability
- Niche customer focus
- End-to-end job posting solution
If you’re a job board that hasn’t considered job crawling as a key differentiator in the field of competitive recruitment, you need to do it now! And what better way to do it than with Propellum.
