How to Build a Profitable Job Aggregator?

Table of Contents

What is Job Aggregator

A job aggregator is a site that gathers job opportunities from job boards, career pages of companies and institutions, and any other places where job openings will be posted.

A job aggregator works as a search engine for jobs – as you enter a keyword concerning a location, position, or a job skill, it will filter through the present job database and show relevant vacancies that fit your description.

For Employers

Obviously, job aggregators help extend the reach to the candidates by dispensing their job opening information on the internet.

Some of them also provide customized company pages for company branding and various other ways to highlight the position or the company itself as the add-on value.

There’s more, job aggregators could be a window for companies to get information about competitors – staffing situation, projects they are on, financial budget, and even more if you probe deep into it.

For Job-seekers

Job aggregator is an important source of information for job-seekers. Getting informed of the latest job openings is just one of the benefits.

Job-seekers can learn better about the company they are interested in through reviews from prior interviewees/employees.

In addition, you may be able to pay for a report about your competitiveness against present contenders.

How Does Job Aggregators Make Money

What a job aggregator does is gathering data and presenting it in a certain way. This is exactly where their revenue comes from: sell the access to the data and sell a preferable way of display for better exposure.

As the business grows mature, a job aggregator may take the role as a contractor to do the whole hiring for a company.

Subscription with pricing tiers: the number of listings to post, the number of resume downloads. That’s what Monster and ZipRecruiter are doing.
Company Branding: Add-on features on the company page, promotion of the page.
Hiring Events: Activity marketing, applicant screening, scheduling, and coordination throughout the procedure. If you want to know more about this business model, Indeed is a nice choice to learn from
Sponsored Postings: Top ranking in the search results (eg. PPC model).
Notifications: Instant notifications when a suitable candidate enters the pool.
Competitiveness Analysis(for applicants): the number of contenders for the same position, comparative strengths, and weaknesses.

There are more variants. The key is to increase the probability for both sides to meet and lower the cost of it.

How to Build a Profitable Job Aggregator

You should start with a good idea, and then a good way to get it done.

Zero in on a Niche Market

Finding your competitive advantage is the key to survive in fierce competition. Chances of success are slim if you don’t differentiate your service from giants like Glassdoor and Indeed.

Octoparse is offering SaaS as well as data scraping services to multiple job aggregator runners (or put it simply, we help scrape job postings to fuel their sites). Before coming up with a good idea, it’s natural for people to think that the market is saturated or those big names have taken up all the market share. That’s why our clients stand out in the market – they are good at finding the niche.

You may build a job aggregator to serve companies and job-seekers in a particular industry, that is, to be industry-based. Areas require high expertise such as finance, healthcare, IT are nice places to start. Or you could build a job aggregator for small cities where people may be short of this job-seeking/staffing service.

Of course, you should know well about the niche you are entering and do competition analysis before you kick start.

Be Resourceful

Once you figure out who your target users are, you need to get what they want to attract them. And this is a vital step to get traction. Scrape a large number of high-quality job postings to your site and make sure they fit your niche.

One of the job boards we are serving focuses on local small cities. The team hunts through the Internet and gets to every possible site where local job opportunities are posted. To be resourceful, they scrap from hundreds of sites, getting valuable information from every nook and cranny.

Difficulties exist. Some of the sites adopt anti-scraping techniques. Millions of records may cause overload and low speed in scraping. Inconvenience downloads and uploads from the scraping tool to the database. Unstructured data. These are very practical issues and have happened to most of our job board clients.

In order to get around these obstacles, Octoparse developed functions like automatic IP rotation, cloud scraping, and API connection, etc. These are important guarantees to the smooth and successful scraping across tons of sites.

If you have great sources at hand but the above issues got you stuck, we are happy to help.

Keep Updating

Recruitment process is always time-limited. If you can offer job openings and hiring information ahead of other job boards, you are doing good for your users.

Companies may not hire the best candidate on the market. Instead, they welcome those who come at the right timing. Make sure your job aggregator is keeping track of the updates of your sources. Be the first one to notify job-seekers: hey, here comes this opportunity, don’t miss it.

We use the mix of schedule scraping, incremental scraping and Cloud to help our client meet this end. Scheduled tasks can run automatically once you set the clock. Incremental scraping will escape the records collected before and only target those newly updated. This means a lot for your storage space and data arrangement! Of course if you use Cloud, forget about the space issue. Our servers will take care of the data for you.

API connection benefits them in another way – save time of switching back and forth from the Client and their database. You can just access data, manage tasks in your own system.

Conclusion

With a powerful web scraping tool, job postings aggregation is realizable. If you are confident with your idea of tapping into the gap in the market, you should try and build your own job aggregator.

Author
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Cecilia W

I am a content writer and a digital marketer in data science who believes in the power with which data can endow people’s businesses. I am working on writings that convey real values. If you have any feedback or ideas about web scraping and data analytics, talk to me at cecilia@octoparse.com.