Table of Contents
Introduction
You’ve probably heard about Indeed, which is known as one of the most
widely used job websites nowadays. So, if you are planning to scrape job
sites, do not skip it. Indeed job posting sites are used in about 60
countries and provide data about job posts, hiring firms, and career pages
from various countries. But what if you do not have any scraping tools but
still need to use Indeed job scraping to get and analyze job-related data? Why not build a web scraper by yourself to collect data from Indeed web? If you have some coding skills, let’s try to scrape Indeed using Selenium. Let’s do it together!
About Indeed.com
Indeed job posting web page is a popular job aggregator where job seekers can find their dream job all over the world. It is a very convenient platform for recruiters as well, as it is free to post job advertisements, though there are some paid features as well, especially if you want to promote your job post. On top of this, Indeed enables users to get valuable insights about competing salaries and companies seeking the same candidates. Having such kind of data to create a competitive and attractive job ad is a decisive advantage.
Why Scrape Indeed Job Posting
Do you know that job-related data stands out as one of the most required information? By Scraping Indeed.com you can get the most actual job data, analyze trends of the job market, investigate Indeed resume dataset, or even gather data about IT job listings with salaries based on location.What are the benefits of Indeed job scraping
Check out how else businesses can benefit from extracting job data. They can:
What data can you get by scraping Indeed
Let’s find out what data you can extract by scraping Indeed, though this is a tight list.
Indeed Job Scraping using Selenium: How to Start
Now, that you know how to take advantage by scraping Indeed, let’s get down to business. We’re going to use Selenium API, which is very handy and recommended particularly for web automation. Besides, it is simple to install using the following code line:
Importing Selenium
Before importing Selenium make sure you have a driver to interface along with the web browser required by Selenium. Drivers can be downloaded from here. Just note that it should be saved in the same directory as your browser app.
Navigating through Indeed
But how does indeed scrape jobs? To understand this, let’s start with navigation. The driver.get method is navigating to a page by using the given URL.
Once you run the above code, you can see a notification that your browser
is being controlled.
Performing a Search
When you are using Selenium, you can take advantage of identifying the required item or button by name, ID, or Xpath. Let’s make an advanced job search by specifying the needed search items and numbers of jobs displayed per page. We can see that “Advanced Job Search” is taken in a <a> tag from the HTML structure. We can use “contains” to identify the Xpath by text.
Then we need to add search values. Here is a piece of code where position,
display number, and results by date are specified.
Extracting Job Card Data at Once
Let’s say that you would like to collect the complete information
related to one job card
Then go through all the jobs on the current page, and move to the next
page. Below is a code to loop to go through job cards on every page and
extract relevant data.
Getting job descriptions from different URLs
There may be a case when you would like to get a job description from different URLs, then you need to use the following piece of code:
And to put them in a one data frame, add:
Common Methods to Extract Data from Indeed
But what to do if you have no coding skills? There are at least three common methods to get data from any web source on any scale:- Buy a scraping tool.
- Hire a freelance web scraper developer.
- Outsource your scraping job to a professional team.
