Job Scraping: Easily Scrape Job Posting from Indeed

Indeed is one of the best job boards in the world. Since its inception in 2004, it has always been a go-to website for many job seekers all over the world. Thousands of jobs across several niches are posted daily and without a doubt, the website is loaded regularly with data.

For those that know about Indeed job scraping, the data on Indeed has proven to be more than valuable. In case you are wondering how to scrape data from Indeed or why you even need this data, this is the article for you.

In this article, we will look at what you can do with Indeed data and how to get started with Indeed job scraping.

Table of Contents

Why do you need an Indeed Job scraper

1. Build a job board

People are always looking for jobs online. Creating an online directory where jobs are constantly posted is a great way for you to help people and make money. However, to do that, you would need to scrape job postings from a big job board like Indeed.

With job data from Indeed, you can create a city-specific job board that only displays jobs from a particular city. Industry-specific job boards are also in high demand, so you can also consider that too. All you have to do is to create a specialized web crawler that can extract these specific data, download the data and build your job board.

2. Understand the job market

The data you get with Indeed job scraping can give you lots of valuable insights into the job market. Indeed is filled with lots of data about jobs salaries, job requirements, skills, and experience. Every job posting has the salary it offers as well as the skills and experience it requires.

With all these data, your HR team can better analyze job trends and the entire labor market in general. Job analysis is a key part of human resource management. But without job data, there can’t be any job analysis. Hence, you need a job scraper.

With all that has been said, you are most likely thinking it must be very difficult to build an Indeed scraper. Well, if that’s the question on your mind right now, stay tuned because, in this next section, we will be answering that question.

Is it hard to build an Indeed scraper?

Let’s go ahead and answer this question straight away. NO! It is not hard to build an Indeed scraper. Even if you don’t have any programming experience, you can still build an Indeed scraper by using a web scraping tool.

A web scraping tool allows you to create a web crawler by simply interacting with software or web application. No coding experience and technical knowledge are needed. Octoparse is one of many web scraping tools. It has all the features you need for a great web scraping experience. By using Octoparse, Indeed job scraping would be easy-peasy for you.

How to use Octoparse to build an Indeed Scraper?

With Octoparse version 8.1 beta, you can scrape data from Indeed by:

Using the Indeed Prebuilt template
Building a crawler from Scratch

Using the Indeed Prebuilt template

Click the Indeed template on the homepage to use the ready-made template directly

To learn more about templates and how to use them, click here.

Building a crawler from scratch

1. Go to the web page you want to scrape

2. Create the workflow

3. Start the extraction

Step 1. Go to the web page you want to scrape

Enter the Indeed URL page you want to scrape in The URL bar on the homepage
Click “Start”

This is a URL for this example.

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=devops&l=Dallas-Fort%20Worth,%20TX&radius=50

Step 2. Create the workflow

Click “Auto-detect web page data”

Wait till you see “Auto-detect completed”
Check the data preview to see if there’s any unnecessary data field you would like to delete.

Click on “Create workflow”

Step 3. Start Extraction

Setup “wait before action”.
Click the setting icon beside the “extract data” button
Tick “wait before action”
Set it to 1 or 2s.
Start Extraction
Click “Save”
Click “Run”
Select “Run task on your device” to run the task on your PC, or select “Run task in the Cloud” to run the task in the cloud.
You can also schedule a task to run the task regularly.

Once all that is done, it will take a few seconds for the software to load and present your data. Here’s a sample of what your extracted data will look like:

Conclusion

Octoparse is a great web scraping tool that gives you all you need to scrape job postings from Indeed. So much can be done with the job data from Indeed. Hopefully, with this article, we’ve been able to inform you about what you can do with this data. If you have any issues, complaints, or questions, feel free to contact us anytime for help.

Author
Recent Posts

Milly F

Milly is a data analyst by profession, a digital marketer by passion, and a pop music lover by heart. She loves to learn knowledge about data science, web scraping, and data analysis and share it through valuable content. Her goal is to help everyone without a tech background gain precious insights from data.