Use Job Scraping To Extract Online Employment Data
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Whether you’re looking for a job or looking to hire, job sites like Glassdoor have tons of useful employment data ready for analysis. Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from a webpage, is the best tool for collecting job data. Job scraping generates useful organizational insights such as the ideal salary, employee sentiment, and how your organization compares to the competition. By extracting and analyzing this data, your organization will make smart, data-driven decisions in the future. The Scraping Robot API allows you to directly input data into your preferred analysis program.
What is Job Scraping?
Job scraping is the automatic extraction of online job data from a webpage. Before fully understanding job scraping, you’ll need to know the basics of web scraping.
Web scraping is the automatic extraction of data from a webpage. A user inputs a URL into the scraper and the scraping tool outputs the entire webpage as data. Scrapers meant for specific websites recognize the data and can organize it. While online data can be extracted manually, this takes too much time, money, and work. Using a web scraping tool saves your organization extraction time, therefore giving you more time to dedicate to analysis and generating useful insights.
How to Scrape a Website for Job Postings
Job scraping is similar to scraping other online data. Job postings on career sites usually consist of
- Job title
- Salary
- Location
- Time commitment (part-time/full-time)
- Job description
- Employer name
- Number of reviews/rating
This data is useful for employers and employees. Employers can get a sense of how they are reviewed by employees online compared to their competitors. Those looking for work can find positions best suited to their skills and experience.
Web scraping job postings
Organizations that regularly use a job crawler experience benefits such as discovering the ideal salary, understanding how their employees feel, and staying competitive within their field. These same benefits extend to job seekers who extract data because their understanding of their place in the job market will become more clear, and they’ll learn about potential employers from former employees.
Find desired salary
Offering a competitive salary is essential to attract the right talent and support your team. In order to find an ideal starting point before salary negotiations, your organization will have to establish a range. Scraping the salaries of similar positions at other companies makes it easier to define this range. By extracting competitor data, your organization ensures that the position is competitive within the industry.
In addition, creating a salary range is important for building an organizational budget. If you’re trying to decide whether or not to hire more employees, it is important to grasp the financial commitment before beginning the application and interview process. Since this process takes considerable effort from both the employee and employer, it is important to establish you can offer them at least a competitive minimum for the work.
Understand employee sentiment
The internet is full of user reviews for products and services. These reviews help consumers decide if a product will fit their needs or not based on previous experiences of others. Job sites have the same approach towards companies and are full of employee reviews of their experiences. These reviews serve as a way for potential employees to better understand the social environment or company culture before committing to a position. Beyond warnings of bad bosses, these reviews are informative when considering what work environment suits you best.
For employers, scraping company review data helps you understand the experiences of former employees. While many organizations have exit interviews, the honesty and distance that online reviews offer provide insight into how your company culture is perceived by others. Similarly, you can scrape reviews of competitors in order to attract quality candidates. When you understand how your work culture is different from a competitor, you can present yourself to potential employees better by highlighting how you operate differently from other companies (perhaps their former employer). This is especially important if you are hiring at higher levels since you are likely competing directly with competitors for talent.
Stay competitive
For employers and job seekers, it is important that the job scraping process becomes a regular part of the data extraction routine. Salaries, job requirements, and company policies shift and therefore staying updated is important. When it comes to retaining talent, you must negotiate new contracts based on current salary data. Therefore, preparing for interviews with current data and expectations is necessary to demonstrate to candidates that you and the organization are competitive and adaptable.
For job seekers, staying updated is the best way to avoid being lowballed or misled. Before interviews, it is important to understand what comparable organizations are offering for the same work (salary, benefits, hours, training, opportunity, etc). In addition to holding bargaining power throughout the interview process, discovering different work options help you reflect on what you value professionally and within a workplace environment. While it is important to be compensated well, it is also essential to find a good fit.
With job markets and our idea of remote work constantly shifting in the past year, employees and employers are beginning to redefine workplace values. Extracting data to understand our current job market is the first step towards tomorrow.
Job Scraping Software
In addition to using a job scraper, there are additional ways to input and aggregate job data for more accurate analysis.
Scraping Robot API
Once all the job data is collected, it is time for analysis. A common issue when you’re working with large data sets is combining all the data for analysis. With the Scraping Robot API, you can directly input multiple data sources into your preferred program for analysis. This makes it easy to combine data across job sites for comprehensive analysis. Additionally, you get access to our Scraping Robot team who can help your organization manage proxies, development, and create scraping solutions specific to your data needs. For more information, check out our API page.
Conclusion
Job data is essential for understanding what employees and employers value. Job sites like Glassdoor and Ziprecruiter have job listings full of useful salary data, job descriptions, employee reviews, and more. Learning to extract and analyze this data helps your organization stay competitive and find the best talent. Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from a web page, makes it possible to extract job data from websites for analysis. Extracting this data provides organizational insights that help you develop a competitive salary range, understand employee desires and values, and stay updated on changes in the job market. Once this data is collected, it can be directly inputted into your preferred analysis program with the help of Scraping Robot’s API.
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