Wrapping your Career Site: Introduction to Job Scraping

What is job wrapping or job scraping?

Job wrapping is a digital data development process that can capture multiple jobs listed in an employer's website or career site and post them under that employer's profile on different or multiple job boards. Since the process requires the capturing of multiple data accurately and regularly, the process has to be done by experts. Job wrapping is usually executed by third-party vendors for or on behalf of their client job boards. 

It was initially called job wrapping because the process makes sure that the employer's open positions get "wrapped up" and posted on a designated job board (or job boards) according to schedule or set recurrence. Job wrapping is the original term but since it was coined, it has evolved into other terms like scraping, mirroring, or spidering. 

• Scraping - This is the second popular term for this process. It is so-called because the process actually scrapes off the jobs from the employer's website and posts them to the designated job board.
• Mirroring - This is also mostly a given term because the process does 'mirror' or copy the employer's job vacancies and reflect them onto the host job board. It reflects the same posts between the client and host websites.
• Spidering - When the job wrapping gets more complex, the more appropriate term is spidering. The simple job wrapping process can branch out at times depending on the requirement of the employer and/or the job boards. Sometimes, employers have different websites where they post their job vacancies. They might want to pull all the jobs throughout their different sites and then post them on one or more job boards. Basically, when the process starts to 'web out,' then spidering is the more appropriate term.

If you are the client employer, you have the option to dictate whatever format fits your hiring requirements. You can specify which details to retain or take out in the job scrape. You just have to communicate that with your third-party data scraper or with your partner job boards directly. 

What is the purpose of job scraping?

Different employers have different recruiting needs. For some, they might just have one or two vacant positions at a given time. But there are companies out there, especially the big ones, who might need to recruit multiple employees to fill their organizational needs. When this happens, an employer might post a long list of jobs on their website. To increase their chances of hiring potential candidates, these employers partner with one or more job boards to get more people to see and therefore apply to their vacant positions. 

The amount of data posted on an employer's career site can be significantly large. It will be a difficult task for their recruiters or hiring personnel to post hundreds if not thousands of jobs daily and one-by-one within their partner job boards. The task gets even more difficult because some company websites refresh their job listings whenever a position gets filled or they usually add vacancies as more roles become available. This is where job scraping saves the day.

Employers can avail a third-party scraper - contracting them directly or as an additional service within their partner job boards - who will scrape off or wrap up their job posts for them. The sole task of the job scraper is to go into the employer's career page/s to capture the jobs and post them in the employer's profile within the destination job board. This task can run once daily, twice daily, weekly, biweekly, etc. It can be done according to the agreed schedule with the job board.

To put it simply, it makes the hiring process easier. 

What are the Benefits of Job Scraping?

1. Automation

The most obvious advantage of job scraping is AUTOMATION. As explained earlier, it takes away the tedious process of having to post and format numerous jobs one-by-one.

2. Efficient Updating of Data

Job scraping is a recurrent service. This means the entire process (from scraping to posting) gets refreshed according to the agreed schedule. Because of this, you are sure that your job feed is updated regularly. When there is a change in the source data, that change is sure to also reflect in the scraped data. If the source data needs to be revised or updated, the destination site won't need to go through all the job list again to update the scrape. The job scraping process itself will update the job posts for everyone (both client and host site).

3. Greater Search Engine Presence

When employers partner with one or more job boards, they increase their chances of getting their vacancies seen by job seekers. Job boards generally optimize their search engine visibility because the main purpose of their business is to attract job seekers into their website. Availing the job scrape service makes it easier for job seekers to see ALL of the employer's UPDATED list of open positions. 

Does HireVeterans.com offer Job Scraping Service?

The answer is YES! Hire Veterans recognize the different job posting needs of every employer. This is why we have included job scraping as an ADD-ON FEATURE for our PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP. However, we do not recommend our job scraping service to all employers. As your partner job board, we want to make sure that you only avail the service that you really need. 

If you are an employer with only a handful of job vacancies, we will offer you other automated options for your job posts which already comes with the PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP package.

If you have hundreds or thousands of jobs but you already have an organized applicant tracking system (ATS) with an XML feed that refreshes your career site regularly, you will also most likely not need to avail the job scraping service. XML Feed importation is offered for FREE with our PREMIUM MEMBERSHIP package. 

Only those who have jobs that fit these requirements will be offered with our Job Scraping Service:

• Employers with thousands of jobs which cannot be captured properly by the free XML Feed importation system.
• Employers with specific data requirements in their job posts. 
• Employers that regularly change their list of vacancies on their site.
• Employers that require the capture of their job listings in two or more sites.

For more information about our Job Wrapping / Job Scraping Service, you may refer to this Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) Page.

Do you fit into the category of employers who might need the Job Scraping Service? What are you waiting for? AVAIL IT NOW!