Job Scraping: How to scrape job postings from company’s job board

A job board is where the companies publicize their job openings and receive applications accordingly. With the launching of career pages and the help of ATS, the company can make its recruitment process much easier to handle.

job opening posted on these career pages gives opportunities for job aggregators. Consultancies, analysts, and other parties hence can get a glimpse of the job market situation. They give clues to the organizational structure, staffing of a company through the list of positions. You can filter through company sites and focus on a specific industry, lists of job openings tell you what is the most needed in the job market and what may be vanishing or replaced by machines.

Besides, job scraping can also be highly beneficial to:

Educational institutions that are updating their career training courses to meet the market needs;
Job board/aggregator runners to fuel their sites with fresh job postings;
Fresh graduates or people planning for a career change looking to align their career plans to the job market realities.

How to scrape job postings from company’s career pages?

There are 3 ways you can scrape the job data from companies’ career pages:

Use a data extraction tool for job scraping

Build your own crawlers: Octoparse is designed for non-coders, with ready-to-use templates and auto-detection function, you can easily build your crawlers to scrape job data from any sites you want.

However, every website varies. In most cases, different company sites present their job data in different layouts. For each of them, you are required to build a customized crawler. If you are scraping job postings from many different sites, there would be much work to do.

SaaS+customized web scraping service: a good web scraping tool can be powerful and should be sufficient for your need of job scraping (as long as you have the well-built crawlers at hand). If you are tired of configuring all the crawlers yourself for your job scraping project, or you have problems in building crawlers that work successfully as you expect, our web scraping service may be the thing for you. Our professional team helps build the needed crawlers, fully customized, and hassle-free.

Building a series of crawlers that can work in different sites could be tricky for new starters in web scraping. Although most of the web scraping tools have adopted countermeasures to cope with the anti-scraping techniques, users still have to know the basics of web scraping, for example, Xpath and AJAX, to put them into use.

>>>Difficulties you may encounter in web scraping

3. One-stop DaaS: The data provider, like Octoparse, will take care of everything. You don’t need to look after any running tasks or bother about the data export and data cleaning afterward. This is a one-stop service that saves you from any web scraping jobs.

If you have no plan to build a web scraping team for your job scraping project and want to focus solely on your business, DaaS is the right pick for you.

How to scrape job postings from Microsoft Careers in 4 steps?

>>>Download Octoparse here for free

Stay with me. This is a step-by-step guide to scrape job postings from a company career page using Octoparse. And you will see how you can get hundreds of job postings within minutes.

STEP 1: Open Octoparse and Enter the URL you are going to scrape from.

(here is the example: https://careers.microsoft.com/professionals/us/en/search-results?rk=l-l-seattlearea)

STEP 2: Start the Auto-detection process

STEP 3: Click and create the workflow

STEP 4: RUN the task right away!

As you click start the task, the crawler you just built will start to work and pull down the data you need. Within a few clicks, now hundreds of job postings in a well structure are within your reach! Just click “Export Data” to download to your local file.

If you haven’t done web scraping before, try it once. You will find that it is easier than you think.

Read this to learn more about: Scrape the Fortune 500 company

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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.