To run a successful job board, you need a good job scraper. With a job scraper, getting relevant and latest job openings would be easy and fast.
In this article, we will run you through how you can build a job scraper for your job board within minutes. But before we begin to talk about that, let’s have a quick look at some of the difficulties involved in building a successful job board.
Difficulties of Building a Job Board
1. Frequent Updates
Companies are always updating their career page. In fact, some update their pages as often as hourly. Scraping through these web pages regularly can be time-consuming and expensive. If you are looking for more job vacancies on other job boards too for jobs, this major web scraping challenge of frequent updates is still present.
2. High Volume of posting data
When you have to scrape through different job aggregators and career pages of companies, you should be ready to deal with high volumes of data. With an extensive amount of data to scrape, the scraper will be slow and that could be very frustrating.
3. Data scraping across multiple platforms
To get the best and latest job openings, you need to scrape from lots of websites. A crawler can only work on one website. To crawl through various websites, you have to go through the workload of crawler building to fit and work on each website you want to scrape from.
Easily build a job scraper with Octoparse
Instead of building a job scraper from scratch using Python and other programming languages, you can easily build a job scraper with Octoparse. A whole lot of revolutionary technologies/solutions have been implemented to solve all the problems you can face while scraping jobs for your job board.
Let’s have a look at these solutions, shall we?
How Octoparse Solves Job Boards Difficulties
1. Scheduled scraping to Follow the Update
Following regular updates across different job aggregators and career pages of companies is hard. But instead of scraping through these pages manually every day, Octoparse provides you with scheduled scraping. With scheduled scraping, you can set the scraping frequency and intervals at which you want the tool to scrape your required data. At the set time, the tool crawls through the pages and retrieves the data you want.
With Octoparse’s scheduled scraping solution, you can have the latest job openings on your job board.
Also, there is incremental extraction that allows you to extract updated data much more effectively by skipping the pages that have already been extracted. Scheduled scraping and incremental extraction help you ensure that you’re up to date on the latest openings in different companies.
2. Cloud scraping and API connection
Crawling through multiple websites can take a long time. Cloud service is the feature to rescue you from slow scraping. Octoparse cloud service uses multiple cloud-based systems to crawl through different websites simultaneously and retrieve the data you need.
Together with cloud scraping, Octoparse API allows you to retrieve your data anywhere you are in the world. With API, you can have constant updates of data sent to your database automatically. You don’t have to go to the software to always download your data manually.
3. Crawler building service for multiple websites
To avoid spending time creating crawlers yourself, you can simply employ the Octoparse crawler building service to help build crawlers for you. All you have to do is to state the website you want to scrape and the data fields you want to get. Customized crawlers will be built accordingly and can be run on Octoparse yourself. There is literally no learning curve.
Use a Job template to build a scraper template
Creating crawlers for each website when scraping from multiple websites can be really stressful. Thankfully, Octoparse has gone through the work of providing a set of job templates for you to use. With simple job templates from big boards like Indeed and Doda, users can simply use these sets of prebuilt crawlers for their job scraping tasks.
Generally, all of Octoparse’s templates allow you to perform complex scraping tasks without spending lots of hours configuring a scraper.
Use advanced mode to build a customized job scraper
Advanced mode is a highly powerful and flexible web scraping mode on Octoparse. If you want to scrape data from complex websites, then Advanced mode is a great choice to start your scraping project.
With Advanced mode, you can extract all forms of data like text, images, HTML, and so on. In fact, it gives you the power of creating a workflow that can interact with websites to perform complex actions like keyword searching, login authentication, etc. You get a full range of customizable options to configure extraction actions and the data extracted.
Conclusion
A job board is a very good business venture in this day and age. Many unemployed people are online looking for open positions in different companies. By creating a job board, you would be helping prospective employees get jobs. What’s more, you would also help employers fill up their empty positions.
However, to avoid the many hurdles involved in making this great business idea a reality, you need a good job scraping tool. Octoparse is the solution!
