Job Boards, Job Portals, or Job Aggregators use data from different sources to build up their websites. When looking for a means to get this data, automated web crawler are the best and the cheapest solution. It helps companies gather a lot of job listings, and also helps in getting the latest job posts.
A web crawler can run through hundreds of website links and scrape anything that looks like a job listing to it. A few hundred lines of code, a cloud infrastructure like AWS EC2 or Lambda, and your web crawler is ready to run.
The Benefits of Using a Web Crawler on Job Boards and Job Portals
While the initial setup can take some time, or need a setup capital, the long term gains of setting up web crawlers. This is done to gather your job feed are magnanimous:
Collecting job listings can prove to be tedious as well as prone to errors. Not only would it cost more to hire many men. But the time taken to bring in certain restraints would impede the growth of your online Job Board or Job Portal. Web crawlers remove the time constraints as well. The possibility of errors from the equation and remove all the data related problems from your business plan. In case you are planning to use paid APIs from multiple sources to get your job listings, you need to remember that every API integration will be different and time-consuming, and the charges will multiply as you keep adding new sources. Instead, if you use web crawlers that run on the cloud, you can scale up at minimal costs.
When you have a web scraping engine that scrapes job listings from many sources, you can get all the latest job posts from various Job Boards, all at your website. Each job post can also have the time and date on which it scraped or posted. This will enable individuals who are on a mission for “job search” to apply to the latest jobs, thereby increasing their probability of getting hired. Also, job portals can choose to remove jobs that are older than say, 30 days, and move them to an archived section that can be to study historical job postings.
Often job posts updated after posting. This can be a change in the requirements, experience, payment offered, and more. By using web scraping bots, or scripts, one can update job listings, as and when they get updated at the source. This way job applicants will always have a more accurate picture of what the person on the other side of the table wants.
The same job listings can end up in many Job Boards. When you have more than one source from where you scrape job data, you need to make sure that duplicates removed.
At the same time, duplicates used to verify the data of job listings. In case of discrepancies, a manual check is done, or data scraped from the company’s website, or in extreme cases, even the company called to verify the listing. It all boils down to making sure that the data on your website is as accurate as possible, and this is something web crawlers can enable you to do.
Building a job portal or a Job Board with many features and leaving it at that will not work. You need to keep understanding the needs of applicants and add new features.
At the same time, you will need to add more data sources, and include more geographical locations, as well as niches in the job industry. Doing this would be a walk in the park in case you are using web crawlers. All you would need to do is train the crawler to scrape a single job post from the new website and the crawler would be able to scrape all listings from the same website.
Traditional job boards would spend more time getting the right data. But when you have web scraping crawlers at your service. You can spend more time analyzing the data, producing useful metrics, cleaning job posts, evaluating their authenticity, and more. You would be able to walk the extra mile. This would benefit your customers and help get free advertisement, through word of mouth.
Web crawlers coupled with machine learning or AI-based systems to cluster or separate the job posts that crawled. This way you can fill jobs related to different niches in different pages. Or you could tag location, industry, sector, role, etc. To each job post using which applicants can filter job listings to find the one most appropriate for them.
When an individual needs to decide which job to apply to. Usually, he requires some information about the company in question. He may want to know the salary band for his role, reviews from current employees, work hours, and more. You could use web crawlers to scrape such company data from websites such as Glassdoor to provide all this information to job applicants since this would enable them to make more informed decisions. This way you can provide better information to enable them to make more informed decisions.
When you have a web crawler at your disposal. You could also scrape profiles of individuals from other websites and add them to their application data. This way a company would also have a better understanding of an applicant by having access to more data points. This data could be social media data or Github repositories.
Most job boards or job portals share links to company websites, or the original job posts, with a job listing. But due to changes in the original post, these links may render broken after some time. To make sure that job applicants do not need to go through the hassle of broken links. You can make your web crawler test the links on your website at specific time intervals. Then update or remove the broken ones.
Conclusion
When building a job portal or an online job search website. You can look at a lot of add-on features that are trending today. While these do enable job seekers to find a suitable job. The data or the quality of the job listings themselves do remain of foremost importance. This is why our team at PromptCloud offers a comprehensive and fully automated job discovery tool- JobsPikr. Not only do you get fresh job feed in real-time using this tool. But also add-on features like filters related to geography and industry. As well as keyword matching and data formatting. With the help of a managed, no-maintenance solution. You can use web crawlers to run your job portal at the greatest efficiency.
