Web Scraping Job Postings: Challenges and Best Solutions

Web scraping job sites: the challenges

Gathering job data, like any data, comes with certain challenges. First and foremost, you must decide which job aggregator sites you will be scraping. Of course, for better data analysis, more than one site should be taken into consideration. 

Certainly, web scraping job postings is notoriously difficult. Most of these sites use anti-scraping techniques, meaning your proxies can get blocked and blacklisted quite quickly. Websites keep getting better at preventing automated activity. However, those collecting data are consequently improving at hiding their footprints as well.

Keep in mind that there are ways to reduce the risk of getting your proxies blocked ethically, without breaking any website regulations. Make sure when web scraping job sites, you do it the right way.  We also have a dedicated blog post explaining how to crawl a website without getting blocked.

However, the main challenge to scrape job postings comes when making a decision on how to get the data. There are a few options you can take:

• Building and setting up a job crawler and/ or in-house web scraping infrastructure.

• Investing in job scraping tools.

• Buying job aggregation site databases. 

Of course, there are pros and cons to each option. Building and setting up a job crawler can be pricey, especially if you don’t have a development and data analysis team. However, you won’t need to rely on any other third party to receive the data you need.

When it comes to buying a pre-built scraper, you save up on development team costs and maintenance, but as already mentioned – you will be relying on someone else to perform well for you.

One of the easier ways to get job postings data is simply buying pre-scraped databases from data companies that perform job scraping services.

As there is not a lot to explain with the last two options, we’ll go over the first one, building and setting up a job crawler, in greater detail. 

Job posting scraping: building your own infrastructure

If you decide to build and set up your own job scraping tool, there are a handful of steps you should take into consideration: 

• Analyze which languages, APIs, frameworks, and libraries are the most popular and are used widely. This will save you time when making development changes in the future. 

• Create a stable and reliable testing environment, as building a job crawler will have its challenges of its own. You should have a simple version of it as well, as the decision making will come from the business side of things, not production.

• Data storage will become an issue, so invest in more storage centers and things about space-saving methods. 

These are just the main guidelines to take into consideration. Creating your own web crawler is a big commitment both financially and time-wise. 

When it comes to fueling your web crawler, deciding which proxies will work best for you comes next. 

Job scraping with proxies

Recommendations: Datacenter Proxies and Residential Proxies

The most common proxies for this use-case based on Oxylabs client statistics are datacenter proxies.  With generally appreciated high speeds and stability, these proxies are a go-to choice for job scraping.

We have several blog posts on what are datacenter proxies for you to read more about, or you can check out this video where our Lead of Commercial Product Owners Nedas explains in simple, yet detailed terms: